No Greater Love
by Colubrina
Summary: Voldemort has won, or mostly, and Death Eaters don't have a retirement plan so Draco Malfoy is stuck serving a master he hates. He and Blaise Zabini just try to keep their heads down and not attract attention. They aren't heroes. Then Hermione Granger gets Snatched and they make the fateful, stupid decision to save her. COMPLETE
1. Chapter 1

**Content warning: Torture. Violence. Major character death.**

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* * *

 **after**

"No," she whispered, reaching out to him as he walked toward the front walk where they were standing. "You can't! Please don't do this, please, I'm begging you," she said in her hoarse voice and his step faltered for a moment before he kept going. "I won't make it without you!"

He didn't look back.

* * *

 **before**

He thought she was dead.

If she weren't, she would be soon.

Blaise didn't think anyone could have lived through what he'd been forced to witness over the past hour. He hadn't even liked Hermione Granger, and he'd wanted to beg the pair of Death Eaters in charge of the show to stop.

He wasn't that stupid, of course, or that self-sacrificing. He'd bit the inside of his cheek to keep from vomiting as the class swot, heroine, and Mudblood met a long, horrible end. He'd only made eye contact with Draco once. The blond had made the tiniest shake of his head from beneath his mask and hood. There was nothing they could do. After that, Blaise had kept his eyes focused on a spot directly to the left of the girl's head so it looked as if he were watching her demise with the greatest of interest and began reciting Potions ingredients in his head. This was what life was now. The Dark Lord had won and Blaise had two things in the world to be happy about: he'd managed to keep from getting a Mark burned into his own arm, mostly by dint of showing enthusiasm for the cause but no interest in moving up the increasingly crowded ranks, and Draco was still alive.

In theory, so was Harry Potter, out in the world doing something heroic and pointless to kill the mad bastard who ruled Britain. Blaise didn't hold out hope of that happening, however. He wanted to just keep his head down - bless his mother for only shagging wizards, since his blood was unlikely to ever land him on a dais like poor Granger, tortured for the amusement of madmen - and he hoped he'd manage to stay alive until it was all somehow over. He'd flee, but the Mark on Draco's arm tied him down. That meant they both stayed, living in their cottage, thankful they'd gotten it under a Fidelius charm, just surviving.

Granger hadn't broken. That amazed him. He doubted she'd been able to speak after a bit, but she hadn't given up Potter. She'd screamed until she couldn't even make sounds, but she'd kept his whereabouts locked in her mind.

"Take care of the body," one of the older Death Eaters said to Draco, who nodded submissively. "Rubbish heap's the place for trash like her," the man added with a laugh as, one by one, the audience sauntered out.

* * *

 **during**

The arms held her up. "Come on, Granger. You have to drink this." Someone put a vial to her lips and she wanted to yank her head away because she was sure it was poison, but she was too weak and, when the potion was tipped down her throat, she swallowed.

"Good girl," she heard that voice say and everything faded away as gentle hands settled her back down. "Sleep will help."

* * *

 **before**

Blaise followed Draco out as he carried the body, cradling it as if she were someone other than the girl he'd despised for years. He reached a hand out to brush some of the bushy hair away from her face, sorrier than he could say that she'd met such an end. No one deserved what she'd endured. When she flinched at the touch, he almost jumped. "Fuck, Draco, she's still conscious."

They both stopped walking and Blaise bent down and put his cheek to the girl's mouth and felt the steady puff of air against his skin as she breathed in and out. He wasn't even sure how it was possible, but she'd survived. "We can't just dump her," he whispered. "Draco, we can't."

Grey eyes met brown ones and Draco said, "It would be suicide." He hefted her body up. "Do you want to die for Hermione Granger, Blaise?"

But they both knew the decision had been made.

* * *

 **during**

Draco sat and braided her hair back; his hands fumbled around the work and he handled the dirty strands with obvious distaste. For three days they'd poured potions down her throat and mostly kept her sedated and healing, but her hair was such a bushy nightmare it kept getting in the way. By now it was sticky with Dreamless Sleep and pain elixirs of all sorts. "It's a good thing Blaise and I are both better at brewing than you ever gave us credit for, Granger," he said conversationally as he worked her hair back into as tight a plait as his inexperienced hands could manage. "It's not exactly like I can loot the stores at Insanity Central, you know. People might start to wonder who I was off torturing in my spare time and they'd want in on the fun."

Blaise rolled his eyes as he held her up. "Am I supposed to talk for her like a puppet?" He tilted his head to the side and said in a high pitched voice, "Oh yes, Draco, you're so good at brewing. Always admired your skill with a flobberworm."

Draco just shrugged as he tied the band at the bottom so her hair wouldn't come undone. "Wanker. Grab another sleeping draught. It's been at least an extra hour since she could have one and she's probably aware of the pain again."

"Always 'ware," the woman between them said, struggling to get the raspy words out. "You're a prat, Mal'oy. Arsehole. But never said you were bad at classes."

Blaise tried to hold her up with one arm and put the next dose to her lips with the other hand but she weakly batted him away. "That shite's 'ddictive," she said. "No more." She clamped her lips shut and Draco shut his eyes and rubbed at his forehead.

"Look who's conscious. Oh goody," he said. "And, surprise, surprise, she's a know-it-all even when she can't even sit up without our help. But, fine, Granger, suffer. It's one less batch we have to make up for you." He got up and stalked off, tossing the spare hair tie down onto the table. "I'd better get back to the Manor and play the attentive and dutiful little Death Eater lest I end up on the wrong end of someone's wand."

He slammed the door on his way out.

Blaise made an annoyed noise and lowered her back down. "We'll get you set right, Granger," he said. "As counter-intuitive as it may be, trust us." He sat next to her, stoking her arm, until she fell into a more natural sleep.

When she woke it was dark. With the drugs cleared out of her system, she could think for the first time since Draco Malfoy and Blaise Zabini had, as improbable as it seemed, carted her off and tried to heal her instead of dumping her into a mass grave.

Everything hurt. Her muscles burned. Her bones ached. Her very soul hurt. But she could think. Voldemort's crew hadn't turned her into a shell like Neville's mother. She was in a bed in a small room and she felt filthy. She'd sweated her way through at least one bout of nasty fever, and not all the potions they'd fed her had gone in her mouth. More, beyond the stink of illness that hung over her, she'd been living on the run for months before she'd been so very carefully alone and vulnerable and Voldemort's Snatchers had grabbed her.

She stirred and the man on the bed beside her woke instantly. "I'll get you more pain - " he began.

"I want a shower," she said. Her voice hurt to use and sounded as if she'd damaged her throat. She turned to look at the man. Dark skin, slanting eyes, high cheekbones. Blaise Zabini. Her eyes fell, almost involuntarily, to his arm. He followed her gaze and slowly pushed the sleeve of his shirt up so she could see the unMarked skin.

"He hasn't got me," he said. "Not that way, at least."

She supposed she shouldn't feel so relieved. The men who'd grabbed her in the woods hadn't rated a Mark either.

"Do you think you can stand?" he asked. She tried, and couldn't, and thus began one of the most humiliating hours of her life. She couldn't fault the man for courtesy. He helped her strip down and kept his eyes firmly on the shoulder where an old, puckered scar, courtesy of a long-ago battle, lay along her skin. He carried her to the small bathroom and stood with her in the shower, his own clothes getting soaked, as he held up upright so she could wash herself. He handed her soap. He undid her hair and washed the matted strands not once but twice. By the time he turned the water off she was shaking from the strain of being upright and sobbing from the utter shame of having to be washed. He did her the kindness of pretending not to notice and instead carried her back to the bed, wrapped in the largest, softest towels she could remember. He changed and brought her a pair of what she guessed were his own pajama bottoms and a worn t-shirt. "We couldn't exactly buy you anything," he said. "People watch everything and everyone. They're encouraged to turn neighbors in for anti-social behavior."

"I know," she whispered. It was why they hadn't been able to trust anyone.

It was why she didn't trust him for all that he was helping her pull on the soft black flannel, for all that he was patting her hair dry.

"Is this when I break down in this little play because you're the savior and tell you - "

"Don't," he said before she could even articulate knowledge she might have. "I don't want to know anything. You're already a death sentence."

"Not if you bring him what he wants to know," she said. "Assuming there's still anything I didn't tell."

Blaise took a deep breath. "You didn't tell anything," he said. She closed her eyes and uttered a brief prayer of thanksgiving to gods she'd long ago stopped believing in. "You screamed and you… I hope you don't recall, to be honest. But I had to stand there and watch the whole thing and you spit in their faces and you begged them to stop but you never… as far as I know you don't have any knowledge to share." She could hear the dripping of the water in the shower and the sound of his breathing and there was a bird outside so, as dark as it seemed, it must be near dawn. Finally, he said, "No one could have withstood that if they had secrets that might have spared them for a moment. You clearly don't."

"Where's Malfoy?" she asked. She was almost sure he'd been there before. She could remember the sound of the door shutting when he'd stalked off.

"Off playing Death Eater," Blaise said.

* * *

 **before**

"Why are you so determined to play the hero?" Draco demanded as he lay the woman's filthy body, nearly a corpse, down onto their bed. "And why for her, of all people?"

"That was just… that was hard to watch," Blaise said in a fit of understatement. "And she was the one it happened to."

There was a moment where they looked at one another and then Draco sighed and began taking stockpiled potions out of one of their cupboards as well as basic brewing supplies. Blaise did some of the simple healing charms he knew - they all knew those now - and they worked in silence until Draco said, "Don't expect me to pull out the heroics. I've never been a hero and I don't plan to start for her."

"I know who you are," Blaise said. He set a single hand on the other man's arm and they stood there for a moment, joined by that simple touch.

* * *

 **during**

She'd been fighting for the spoon when Draco Malfoy came back, flinging a soiled robe over a chair. The shower had exhausted her, but Blaise had coaxed her into trying to eat and so she sat, propped in the large bed, a tray over her lap and a food in front of her. The spoon she'd finally convinced Blaise she was capable of using shook in her hand at the sight of the mask in Malfoy's. She struggled to control her fear and took another bite of the bland mush Blaise had made for her.

"Feeding her breakfast in bed?" Draco asked. "You're doting."

"How was work?" Hermione rasped out. "Off killing children or did you stick to people who could fight back? Little old ladies, maybe?"

Draco's steps across the floor hesitated for a brief moment before he said, "Those little old ladies are tricky bastards; I try to stick to school girls." He dropped the mask on the counter and began preparing himself a plate of toast while she watched.

"Your father must be so proud," she said. The jab made Blaise go grey and she watched Malfoy's jaw clench. He rather deliberately pulled bread from a package, used his wand to toast it, and began spreading marmalade. He held the butter knife in a manner that suggested he was considering transfiguring it to something sharper and finishing her off the Muggle way.

"He probably would be," the man said after he very deliberately set the knife down. "Unfortunately, he's no longer with us so he'll have to forego any pride in my murderous talents, as well as the utter shame he would have felt that I didn't just dump your Mudblood body on the midden like a good boy." He took a bite of his toast and chewed as the cereal she'd been eating stuck in her own throat. "Much worse than the whole gay thing," he said conversationally after he swallowed. "Saving someone like you, I mean. Blaise he could write off as just a minor, youthful indiscretion, sure to result in nothing more than the occasional extended vacation away from our wives, and he did, but you? You're a disaster."

"I'm sorry," she said, stung and angry and guilty all at once. "I'll leave as soon as I - "

"That, Granger, is where you're wrong," Draco Malfoy said. He glowered at her from where he leaned against his small counter. "They think you're dead, and, through some dollop of luck we had no right to expect, no one went out to check the body pit to make sure you were in it."

She closed her eyes as his words battered into her.

"But as soon as you go wandering about with that oh-so-distinctive hair and that face that's on every wanted poster, you'll get caught, and while I don't care at all about your fate, I am fairly invested in not having Alecto Carrow show up with a knife in one hand and a wand in the other, eager to find out why a woman whose body I was told to dispose of is rather peculiarly alive."

His anger hung there. Draco Malfoy was stuck with her, didn't want to be, and resented the danger whatever impulsive choice he'd made to bring her home had put him in. She didn't blame him. Not really. She'd be furious too if she'd been saddled with caring for him, knowing every moment he was with her decreased her chances of long term survival.

"I'm afraid you have to stay," Blaise said. "We'll figure out something eventually, but right now - "

"I'll get polyjuice," Hermione said. It wasn't fair for her to stay and put them at risk. Her eyes were still pressed closed so she missed the reaction to her words. "I'll look like your damn mother just long enough to go to France and disappear - "

The Death Eater's mask hit the wall beside her head and fell to the bed with a thump. She shrank away from it and opened her eyes to see Draco Malfoy, fists clenched. He seemed bigger in his fury, and frightening in the way the petulant schoolyard bully never had been. "Twitchy little ferret," she whispered, determined to be uncowed. "Don't like the idea of me mimicking your precious mummy? Fine, get me any - "

"She's dead," Draco said. He took a step toward the bed and released and reclenched his fists. "So it would be a trifle obvious if you disguised yourself as her, even assuming I'd be willing to go find a hair lingering on her brush for you. Which I would not."

"How?" Hermione whispered, the word out of her mouth before she considered how much he probably didn't want to talk to her about this. He raised a hand and she braced herself for the blow, but instead he turned and flung his body back out the door, the rest of his toast abandoned. Blaise followed him and she was left alone with her cereal and a Death Eater's mask leering at her from the pillow where it had fallen.

She tried to get the tray off and set to the side but her hands shook and it ended up tumbling to the floor where it lay, cereal spread out in a circle. She curled onto one side and would have cried but that hurt too much. She stared out at the small cottage and let her eyes trace along the lines of the furniture over and over again. There was the one bed. There was a small kitchen along one wall. A couch sat on the opposite. A table squatted in the space between them. It was a small cottage, sunny and inviting in the morning light. It was a retreat. It was a home.

She had no idea why they'd brought her here instead of leaving her on the midden, as Malfoy had so charmingly put it, like good little minions of evil. It wasn't as if they liked her.

Neither man returned and eventually, despite the pain, she slept.

When she woke, it was getting dark again, another day gone into a haze of pain and sleep, and Draco Malfoy was sitting at the side of the bed, his white hair down over his eyes as he rubbed one hand over the bare skin of her back in a steady motion. She jerked away from his touch and he lifted his dropped chin to look at her. "It helps," he said without introduction. "When you've been crucioed, having someone just stroke your skin like this helps. I'm not sure why, but Blaise figured it out one day when I'd… I'd failed to please and suffered the consequences." He put a hand on her lower back and rolled her onto her stomach, slid a hand back under the t-shirt, and returned to running a hand over her skin. She could feel a scratching where he had developed some kind of callous as he passed his hand back and forth over her.

"I'm sorry," she said, her already quiet words muffled even more against the pillow. "I didn't know you'd been…but of course you have."

"Been on both ends of that one," Draco said, his hand never faltering. "Cast it the first time at sixteen. Felt it then, too."

She didn't know what to say.

"Not like what you… that was something special. I'm shocked you're not a gibbering idiot after that, really. You should be."

"Thought you already thought I was a gibbering idiot," she said. Blaise was passed out next to her, one arm tucked under his head. She supposed it was Malfoy's shift to watch her.

"Not gibbering," he said. "Annoyingly clever, really." She could die happy, soothed like this, she thought. Still mostly asleep, she let herself sink into the bed and the silence, both of which seemed to enfold her in comfort she'd never expected to feel again.

* * *

 **before**

Draco sank into one of the hard, wooden chairs at their small table and rubbed his head. Hours later they'd gotten the witch resting as comfortably as could be reasonably hoped, mostly via heavy painkillers. He'd brewed and Blaise had healed and they'd both cringed when she tried to scream at even the lightest touch.

Now she was on their bed.

Blaise settled into the seat next to him and nudged his foot. "How are you?" he asked.

Draco shrugged. "There's a Mudblood in our bed, my head hurts, and I kind of want to fuck you so I can stop thinking." He looked over at the other man. "How are you doing?"

"I'm tired," Blaise said. "Raw, I think, after tonight." He let out a sad huff as he looked over at the woman they'd rescued. He'd never been a fan of hers. He wasn't the kind of violent extremist the Death Eaters cultivated, but he'd never considered Muggle-borns as anything other than lesser, and this one had been particularly grating. She'd trampled over customs and traditions with self-righteous abandon, sure that she knew more about the world she'd entered because she'd read a book than people who'd never known anything else. She'd judged, and thrust her hand in the air and her chin out, and managed to antagonize everyone but Potter and his merry sidekick.

He felt grudging admiration that she'd stuck with her friends until the proverbially bitter end. Most in her shoes would have fled back to the relative safety of the Muggle world and left the wizards behind to fight their own battles.

"Why couldn't it have been someone who got on their bad side but who wasn't, well, you know," Blaise asked, his eyes never leaving the prone figure.

"Yeah," Draco said. "Ginny Weasley, maybe? I know you aren't a fan of hers, but - "

"At least she's not Granger," Blaise said. "Assuming she's still alive."

Draco shrugged The Weasley clan had gone into exile after the Battle of Hogwarts. They'd been smart enough to recognize they needed to leave and, if the girl had gone with them, she'd probably survived. Maybe she'd stayed to fight. Maybe she'd died at the end of someone's curse. Maybe she was living in hidden squalor. He didn't care. He didn't have the energy to care about anyone other than Blaise anymore. "Well, we're stuck with her now," he said. "Like a Kneazle kitten you find at the side of the road and decide to take home."

"I hope she's litter box trained and doesn't scratch the furniture," Blaise tried to quip and Draco laughed. "It'll never be enough," he said more seriously. "I can't… how do you make things like that right?"

Draco didn't answer because he didn't think he ever could. There was no atonement for the role he'd played in helping to bring this obscenity to power. So he healed one, worthless Mudblood. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough, and every day he added more crimes to his tally.

Blaise leaned over and caught the blond man's chin in his hand, interrupting his thoughts. "About the fucking," he said.

"Merlin, yes," Draco said.

They were tired, and worn out, and Draco reeked of the potions ingredients he'd chopped and sliced and grated, as well as the ever present stench of blood, but they fell into one another with mouths and hands desperate to push away another night of hell, desperate to silence the demons. "You should go," Draco said as he wrestled the other man's trousers off. "Get out of here, go to the continent. You have the resources. You can - "

"I'm not leaving alone," Blaise said. It was an old argument. "You can't go, so I won't."

"You're a fool," Draco muttered, but he was grateful for it anyway.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Many, many alpha and beta readers have helped me with this one. It's the fic that didn't want to be birthed and their midwifery skills coaxed it into being against its own will. Much love and thanks to shayalonnie, turbulenthandholding, sunset-oasis, slytherin bunney, stefartemis, and ibuzoo.**


	2. Chapter 2

**during**

"Are you a fool?" Draco demanded. Hermione stiffened at his voice but didn't turn around. She was determined to not be dependent, not completely at least. She'd decided she could cook because that wouldn't take more energy than she had, and, if she didn't know a lot of cooking charms, well, she'd found a primer in the back of a recipe book shoved on a shelf and she'd been using those.

She was shaking where she stood from fatigue, and she'd clearly over-estimated what she could do, but she'd be damned if she admitted that now with Draco Malfoy banging the door open and hurling insults at her. "I'm making food, she said. "I understand that even the evil have to eat."

"We live off the agony of our foes," he said. "Blaise, what is going on?"

"She's cooking," Blaise said. He was as disgruntled about the entire idea as Malfoy seemed to be, but he'd stopped arguing, thrown his hands up, and said if she wanted to kill herself he wouldn't stop her. "She wants to earn her keep, or something like that."

Malfoy made an incredulous noise. "You aren't a bloody house elf, Granger," he said. "You were almost dead a week ago. You need to… for the love of… just do nothing, would you? Just let your body heal and don't undo all our work in patching you back together."

"I'm fine," she said. "It's just dinner." She went to sit down in a chair with as much emphasis as she could to let him know she had this and she was fine. She misjudged the distance to the seat, however, hit the edge of the chair, and slipped off to the floor where her hip slammed into the edge of a rag rug. She bit through her lip at the shock of how much that one fall hurt. She was still gasping when Blaise grabbed the wand she hadn't dropped, the spare wand they'd somehow found for her, and tossed it to Draco who caught it and tucked it away.

"Do you want to die?" Blaise demanded. "Was getting captured some kind of suicide attempt? Death by Death Eater?"

She huddled on the floor. She tended to think of Blaise as the softer of the pair of them. He was the one who wasn't branded on his arm, after all, but the neat way he'd taken her wand away from her combined with the efficiency of how he'd passed it over to Draco reminded her that he was just as much a survivor in this world as the other man was, and not her ally. "I'm not," she said. "I just want to do something." She tried to get up but her leg collapsed under her and she would have fallen to her knees if Blaise hadn't grabbed her.

He opened his mouth to scold her again but she just started to cry and he froze. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm just trying to be able to leave so you aren't… I know you don't want me here and I don't… I'm just so worthless right now and I'm not used to being - "

Draco took her from Blaise's grasp and put his hand over her mouth. "You're such a fucking pain," he said. "Have to show off all the time. Oh, brutal torture at the hands of sadists? No problem, not for Hermione Granger. She'll just bounce right back." He swung her up into his arms and some part of her brain noted that being a Death Eater seemed to keep him fit because he carried her like she weighed nothing. "You need to stay in bed and get better, and if I have to bloody well tie you to the fucking frame with a leash to get you to do it, I will, do you understand?"

She considered daring him to try it, but the look on his face suggested he wasn't bluffing.

"Showers," he said. "The toilet. Other than that, stay in bed." He seemed to think for a moment. "You can eat with us at the table."

"I can do what?" she nearly hissed. "You don't get to - "

"Assuming you're strong enough." He set her down on the bed and made a production of tucking her in. "I doubt you are today after over-straining yourself like that."

She began to sputter with an outrage that would have been more effective if being back in the bed wasn't really nice. She wanted almost nothing more than to lie down and go back to sleep.

Almost nothing.

Wiping that smug look off Malfoy's face, however, would be better than sleep.

The look did fade when he saw her mouth. "Fuck, Granger," he muttered, "You're bleeding."

She picked her hand up and touched her lips then looked at the red on her finger tips. She really had bit through it when she fell. "Bit my lip," she said. She reached out and rubbed the blood on his mouth. "Present for you, Malfoy."

He quirked an eyebrow up and said, "Not the first time I've had your blood on me, Granger. Not even the first time this week. If you hoped to make me recoil in horror at your filthy bodily fluids, you've picked the wrong Death Eater." He patted her and added in a condescending tone. "Be good and I'll let you go for a walk outside tomorrow."

"I'm going to see you dead, Malfoy," she muttered from the bed.

He patted her again. "You see if you can keep that thought in your pretty, little head while I go finish the meal you tried to make."

Blaise, the bastard, snickered from across the room and she would have told them both a thing or two if she weren't already falling back into the exhausted slumber of healing.

Blaise nudged her awake after five minutes, or maybe fifty, and she tried to sit. He helped her pull herself up so she could lean against the headboard but as soon as she tried to move to get out of the bed, he placed a hand against her sternum.

"While you slept, I got treated to a lecture about patient care," Blaise said. "I'd been careless, and let you do too much, and now you'll probably have a setback." Hermione began to protest that they weren't her keepers, but Blaise ignored her and just picked up a bowl of thin soup and asked if she needed help eating it.

She didn't, or so she wanted to believe, but her hand trembled as she held the spoon and she could feel a tear hover at the edge of one eye. She wasn't sure which was worse: how frustrating being this weak was, or how humiliating.

Malfoy was washing up the dishes and she could hear him bang pots around. "Just feed her," he said from where he stood at the sink. "It'll go faster."

Blaise's hand moved toward the spoon in hers but he saw her jaw begin to quiver, a quiver she tried to control but she couldn't even get her hand to do what she wanted, much less her emotions. That made him stop. "I think she's got it," he said. "And I'm not in a hurry."

"Suit yourself," was all Malfoy said.

The weight of being a burden sat more heavily on her than the spoon felt in her shaking fingers as she moved one mouthful of broth after another from bowl to lips. "I'll do what you say to get better," she whispered when she finally handed the empty dish back to Blaise Zabini. "Then I'll take off and hide, somehow. You don't have to worry about being stuck with me."

He handed her a napkin and the pity in his eyes stung. "We don't begrudge you space and time to heal, Granger."

No, she thought as she fell, unravelled, back into sleep. You just begrudge that I exist. You just begrudge me your world.

She woke up, again, to the feel of Draco Malfoy's hands running over her skin with slow, deliberate pressure. He'd pushed her loose pajamas up and began with his hands above her knees, wrapped them around her leg, and slowly pulled them toward her foot. The motion soothed the tingles and knives and jerks that ran up and down all her nerves all the time; she didn't open her eyes, didn't say anything. She just lay on his bed and let a man who'd always despised her work at making her ever so slightly less injured. She considered he and Blaise had learned to do this because he'd felt the effects of this curse more than once. At sixteen, he'd said. He'd had his first time at sixteen. Hot tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down onto her pillow as she wept for him, the boy who'd been broken, for herself, barely able to stand for more than a few minutes at a time, for Harry and Ron, still - she hoped - out in the woods. They surely thought she was dead.

Safer for them to think that. They'd try to mount a rescue.

The tears fell as Draco Malfoy worked with gentleness and patience she wouldn't have thought he possessed until she sniffled and he realized she was awake. His hands stilled, she sniffled again, and he pulled the cloth back down around her legs, tucked the blankets back on either side of her, and squatted by her face with a handkerchief.

Of course he had a handkerchief. Draco Malfoy was one of those people who always had a clean, linen handkerchief to hand. The world could end and hell could reign - as it had and did - and he'd have a fabric square somewhere on his person. He wiped at her cheeks with the same steady competence he'd used to settle the creep and prickle in her nerves.

"The pain fades eventually," he said. "I know it's hard to believe when you're in the middle of it, but it does."

She took the handkerchief from him and swiped at her face with far less care than he had.

"You'll get better faster if you rest," he said. "I've rarely had the luxury to do that. Let me give it to you, Granger." She shivered and didn't answer and he pulled blankets up higher for her and turned away.

* * *

 **later**

She held the cloth to his forehead. Another day, another bit of torture at the hands of his fellows. Sometimes they seemed to her like schoolyard bullies given cattle-prods. They couldn't resist using them. Late to a meeting? Have a little pain. Didn't find enough useful old spells? Have a little pain. It wasn't even Voldemort. His fools and flunkies were just as happy as he was to hurt anyone they could.

Draco grabbed her wrist. "You don't have to do that," he said.

She pulled away. "Since when do you get to tell me what to do?" she asked. He let out what would have been a mocking laugh once and closed his eyes as she began to wring out another cloth to lay across his head.

It wasn't much. It didn't come close to being enough. It wasn't the week of rest he really needed. She told herself it was better than nothing. It was all she had to offer.

* * *

 **during**

After a shower Blaise had conceded she could have on her own, though he'd settled down to read a book and refused to leave the room in case she fell, she sat outdoors and felt the sun on her skin for the first time since she'd been Snatched. Blaise settled behind her, a wide-toothed comb in his hands, and picked it carefully through her curls. He acted offended at her brief concern he might not know how to deal with hair like hers, noted his mother had very similar hair, and proceeded to show he was, as was seemingly a habit with him, right. He knew what he was doing. He was certainly better at the task than Malfoy.

"Why do you stay?" she asked as he worked. "You have money, right?"

"Enough," he said. "Enough to go, enough to take Draco with me, leaving Manor and Malfoy vaults to the current government, but he can't."

Hermione made a curious sound and Blaise added, his voice taut, "He tried to ignore a summons through the Mark once, after his mother. He lasted two hours before he broke and let that… before he answered the Dark Lord's call." The hand combing her hair didn't falter. "I thought they'd kill him just for being late, never mind his parents."

"He survived," Hermione said.

Blaise just said, "Mostly."

"So you can't leave," she said.

"I won't leave alone and he can't leave, so, no I can't. Not unless I want to watch him die in agony in front of me." Blaise said. "And I didn't even care for seeing you suffer, so imagine how much less fond I am of the idea of seeing him endure that."

Hermione cast around for a way to change the subject and settled on, "How did you two meet?"

Blaise laughed at her. "We all went to the same school, Granger, like half the wizards in Britain. We were in the same House. I saw him almost every day from the time we were eleven."

She could feel her face grow warmer at his snort of derision at her stupid question. "That wasn't what I meant," she muttered. "I mean - "

"How did we end up in this little love nest?" Blaise asked, definitely teasing her now. "How did we decide that maybe shrill little Pansy wasn't quite the thing for either of us?"

She crossed her arms and refused to answer.

"It's hard," he said. "I mean, we both like girls too, so it could have been worse, but you do self-censor a lot in boarding school lest you out yourself to the wrong guy and end up beaten to a pulp for your trouble. You don't walk up to someone and compliment him on his arse." He set the comb down and began sectioning her hair into four parts to tie back in neat plaits. "Draco's is quite nice, in case you hadn't noticed."

"It's all the Quidditch," she said without thinking. "Those players all end up with great -"

She stopped in horror at what she'd just admitted.

"I," Blaise said, "am telling him you have been admiring his arse. I bet you've done it for years, haven't you. Sitting up there in the Quidditch stands pretending you care about the game and just ogling the players." He tugged on her hair. "I think I could grow to like you if you're really more than just the stick-up-your-own—arse swot you seem to be."

"You must have mentioned something," Hermione said, moving resolutely on. "McClaggen had a great arse too, but you don't see me living in an idyllic cottage with him."

"He also had a brain the size of a pea," Blaise said dismissively as he braided her hair. "No, Draco's brilliant, truly brilliant, you know. Those 'Potter Stinks' badges back in the day were all him. He's got a mind for magic that's fascinating to watch, and he's loyal - fiercely loyal - and there's that arse." Blaise tied a knot at the base of the last plait and said, "There, that should keep your hair under control for a bit. My mother eventually just went for very short hair, but I don't think you have the bone structure to pull that off, so you're stuck with this mop."

"So how did you…" she prodded one last time.

"He pushed me up against a wall sixth year and shoved his tongue down my throat," Blaise said. "He's loyal and brilliant, but not very subtle."

Hermione began to laugh. "No," she said, thinking of her history with the wanker. "I suppose he's not."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you, everyone, for your many kind responses to this, both here and on tumblr. I appreciate it more than I can say.**


	3. Chapter 3

**during**

Darkness sank around the cottage as the three sat. Blaise had made dinner, mocking Hermione the whole while for not being allowed to help, and, like all of them, he was a competent but uninspired cook. Years of Potions classes and they all could follow a recipe. A life spent in boarding school had ensured they'd never learned any culinary arts to speak of. The combination led to cooking no one objected to and no one raved about. It was just food. It just kept them alive.

Blaise had tucked Hermione into the one armchair, folding blankets around her ignoring the way she muttered she wasn't an invalid and he didn't need to be quite to over the top with the fussing. Then he and Draco had sprawled out on the couch, Draco's head in Blaise's lap. The scene had a deceptive domesticity about it and it lulled Hermione into asking the question she'd had since she's realized Malfoy wasn't quite just the prejudiced, sullen git she remembered from school.

"Why did you do it?" she asked. Malfoy wasn't a monster. He wasn't a sadist. He'd been a boy. He was more caring that she would have expected, and he and Blaise loved one another with a quiet, unsentimental strength. What had made him embrace a death cult when they were teens?

"Join the Dark Lord?" Malfoy clarified. When she nodded he snorted and the contemptuous sound made her flinch. "You really are a naive little bitch, aren't you?" he asked. "What makes you think I had a choice?"

She started to protest that everyone had a choice, but he cut off her words with another rude noise. "I was young and stupid and thought I could make up for your lot sending my father to prison," he said. "I wanted to, oh, get revenge, I suppose. Show the Dark Lord our family was valuable. Show up Potter. All sorts of things that seem ridiculous now."

Blaise ran his fingers through Draco's hair in an absent-minded caress that spoke to their long familiarity with one another as he went on. "But it didn't matter. If they hadn't got me at sixteen they would have at eighteen. I was born to that side, and with my father a member it was just a matter of time." He locked his eyes on hers. "Do you really think you had a choice?"

"I… yes," she said. The question flustered her.

"No," he corrected her and she hated how condescending he sounded. How smug. How much like he knew things she didn't. "You - all the Mudbloods - had to be on the side of the Order because the Dark Lord wants to kill you, preferably slowly. If you'd shown up at his doorstep, filled with passion for the Dark Arts and eager to join his merry band, he would have laughed in your face as he tore your body to shreds with magic."

Hermione huddled back into her chair, verbally slapped by how true that was. She hadn't had any interest in Dark magic but her choices had been to fight or hide, and even hiding didn't mean she'd never have to fight again, only that she might put it off a bit. "But you," she protested, going back to her first question. "You could have - "

"No," Malfoy stopped her again. "Your great leader, your Dumbledore, watched me that year I was assigned to kill him or see my parents murdered. He watched every move I made, watched me nearly kill students, and did nothing. Then, when it was too little, too late, he pretended to offer to take my mother and me into hiding, to protect us." Hermione had never seen a face quite so contorted in rage as Malfoy's was at that moment. "He could have offered that at any time but decided not to until it was too bloody late." He took a deep breath and she watched him get himself under control with an act of will. "I may not love the Dark Lord - I'd rejoice to see your friend Potter take the bastard down if we're being honest - but I hate Dumbledore. If Snape hadn't killed him, I'd rip the bastard apart with my bare hands."

"Why?" she asked in a whisper. Dumbledore had been her hero. He'd been the light that guided Harry, and thus her. He was _good_. She couldn't imagine a world where Dumbledore didn't do the right thing. Malfoy had to be mistaken, he had to have misunderstood, somehow.

Draco looked at her for a long time and she became aware of a drip from the faucet and the way the lantern on the table flickered across his cheekbones. "He could have saved her," he said at last, "and he didn't. He used me just like he used you and Potter and everyone else who crossed his path. We were all nothing but pawns on his chessboard." Draco closed his eyes. "At least the Dark Lord's never pretended to be anything but power-hungry and mad."

She shivered and Blaise stirred at the sight. "Are you cold?" he asked her. "I could get more blankets."

"No," she said. "Thank you."

The faucet dripped and the light flickered and finally she said, "Malfoy?"

"What?" he asked.

"Could you not… use that word? About me, I mean?" She felt pathetic asking, especially given what he had to endure every day, but she hated it.

"Mudblood?" Malfoy opened his eyes and studied her. At last he shrugged. "If you prefer."

* * *

 **later**

Draco tossed his mask down as he slammed his way through the door. "What's for dinner?" he asked. Hermione looked up from where she flipped through one of the old books he'd smuggled out of Hogwarts. She could always tell whether he'd had a good day or a bad day. Bad days involved bleeding. On good days he was just generally pissed off at the world.

"Soup," she said.

Blaise picked up the mask and studied it. "These things are like little sculptures," he said. "I have to admire the metal work."

"Good silversmiths," Draco said. "Pity they have tiny vocabularies."

"It's not their fault you've changed," Blaise said.

* * *

 **during**

"I'm sorry," Hermione said.

Draco lifted his head and looked at her. She huddled in their armchair, buried in the blankets Blaise had tucked around her as if he could will her to health by smothering her. "For what?" he asked. If she planned to apologize for asking him not to use a slur, he'd laugh until he cried. It was a reasonable enough request - he didn't think he'd care to hear it all day long in her place - though it meant he'd have to use two separate vocabularies at home and at what passed for work. Calling people like her 'Muggle-borns' would paint a target on his own back among Death Eaters. Sympathy for 'magic-stealing scum' was unheard of, even if most of the pureblood elite mocked the idea that the Muggle-borns could steal magic.

"I should have… that sixth year when Dumbledore wasn't doing anything to help you," she said. "I knew something was wrong. You were paler than usual and looked sick all the time. I should have done something. Said something."

Draco let his head drop back down. "It wouldn't have mattered," he said. "I wouldn't have listened." He was touched, though, that she'd noticed. He hadn't thought anyone had, other than Blaise, who'd kissed him and watched him with his dark eyes, but who hadn't had any answers. He indulged, briefly, in a fantasy where Hermione Granger had cornered him and asked what was wrong and he'd told her - actually told her - and she'd helped him. If someone had helped him maybe he could have escaped. Maybe he wouldn't have let the Death Eaters into Hogwarts, Dumbledore wouldn't have been murdered, Potter would have had more help on his mad quest.

Of course, no one had. No one cared about the son of the imprisoned Death Eater, the bully, the snake. Not then. Not now.

No one but his parents, dead despite his best efforts, and Blaise. It was overwhelming and he was lost and there was no way to leave. Blaise's fingers stroked at his hair, the comforting touch a lifeline that still couldn't save him.

"I should have still tried," Hermione Granger said. "I should have known."

"You don't have to be perfect," Blaise said. "We were arseholes to you. You didn't need to try to save us."

"You saved me," she pointed out.

"Not really," Draco said. "You're still stuck here. Don't think it counts."

"It does," she said.

Days passed in a quiet blur. He'd go to what passed for work and spend hours sorting though the myriad rooms of Hogwarts. The Dark Lord had a yen to find every magical trinket and bend them all to his will. Most Death Eaters considered the assignment scut work and beneath them, but he found it peaceful. He'd sit alone in one dusty room after another and pull out lost treasure after lost treasure. Each one he'd clean, catalogue, and then store in a room he'd set up as a giant, free-standing library of magical objects. McGonagall, still alive, had come and watched him a few times. She'd aged when her side lost and, while she stayed at the school to do what she could, the toll it had taken on her was obvious. "You're a good man," she'd said once. "Why are you helping him?"

Draco had silently rolled up his sleeve and showed her the Mark. She'd stared at him, and it, only turning away when he said, "You and yours gave me no choice."

After that she hadn't come back.

Granger seemed stronger every night. Draco would return home, covered in dust, and flop down onto the couch. "Another day, another murder?" she asked one night from the chair where Blaise continued to tuck her.

"Mmm," Draco said and studied her. Her hair was up and off her neck and he found it peculiar to see the planes of her face laid bare, without the pouf of hair that normally dominated her features. She'd donned one of Blaise's tank tops and the material hung on her still-gaunt frame. He wondered how long she'd been on short rations before she'd been Snatched.

"A baby this time?" she asked from where she sat, "Or did you risk it all and go after an old lady?"

"Mostly I murdered rabbits," he said. She looked so confused he felt the first real smile in days pull at his mouth and leaned forward as if confiding a secret. "Giant, ferocious dust bunnies to be precise. They'd taken over a store room filled with records of the magical experiments of the 1400s and they had to go. But, Granger, they fought me." He smirked at her and brandished his arm as if he were waving a wand. "Nevertheless, the brave Death Eater conquered, and they have all been banished whence they came."

Granger tried not to smile. Her eyes crinkled up and her lips twitched and Draco realized with a start he hadn't seen her look anything but scared or tired or sad since he'd brought her home. This was an improvement, though she did succeed in shoving the smile away and replacing it with a look of mock disapproval. "I see they left their mark on you," she said. "Not clean kills."

"No," he looked down at the dirt on his hands. "I'll never be clean again."

Blaise punctured the silence that greeted that remark with a sharp laugh. "Nice try, drama queen," he said, "but we still have hot running water. Go use it."

"He's very bossy," Draco said to Hermione as he stood up. "Have you noticed?"

That brought the twitch back to her lips and this time she had a much harder time suppressing it. "I have," she said.

When Draco emerged from a shower that could never be long enough, Blaise was making dinner with his usual indifference and Granger had her head down over one of their few books. He sauntered over, planning to twit her for reading what he was sure was the one romance title that he'd grabbed by accident when taking books from the Manor.

She wasn't reading _Sacrifice for Love_ , however. When he squatted down in front of her and pushed at the book to see the cover, what she had instead was a technical manual on Dark magic curse abatement. "Doing a little casual reading?" he asked her.

She shrugged and the motion made the too-large tank-top she'd borrowed from Blaise fall down one arm, revealing her shoulder. "I like to be prepared," she was saying as Draco stared at the jagged scar that tore across her skin.

He reached a hand out and brushed his thumb along the puckered flesh. "How?" he asked.

She went to pull the shirt up self-consciously but he didn't move his hand away from the scar. "It's not a big deal," she said. "It's old."

"I see that," he said.

He continued to run his thumb over the white tissue and she sighed. "It's from the battle at the Department of Mysteries," she said. "They told me afterward I should have died, but I didn't, and it's fine."

Draco remembered that battle. It had been, in a way, what had started him on this path. His father had been sent to prison by her side and condemned as a failure by his own. He himself had been desperate to avenge what he'd seen as his family's tarnished honor. It was hard to recall those days of righteous indignation now. "You were fifteen," he whispered.

"Sixteen," she corrected him. "As old as you were when…" She stopped and tipped her head toward his arm.

"Too young," he said. He realized he'd stopped stroking the scar and had gripped her tightly, his thumb on the old mark and his hand curled under her armpit, and she hadn't pulled away from him or flinched at his polluted, dangerous, Death Eater hands. "We were all too young."

"It was what it was," Hermione Granger said. "We've been at war so long I don't even remember, really, what anything else is like."

Draco bowed his head, his hair hanging over his eyes. "I know," he murmured. "Would it matter if I said I was sorry?" He'd always considered the Battle of the Department of Mysteries in light of the way it had started the slow decline of the Malfoy family. He'd never thought about how grown Death Eaters had launched advanced curses at children.

"You didn't do it," she said.

"I did other things," he said. "I've done plenty." He brushed his fingers over the scar once last time before he stood. It was another apology, perhaps, or an echo of the way his mother had once kissed his injuries.

"I'm cold," Hermione said as she tugged the shirt she had on back over her shoulder, hiding the curse scar. "Do either of you have a jumper I can put on?" Draco accioed one from his drawer and handed it to her without speaking. She touched the grey cashmere with quickly hidden delight at its softness and then pulled it over her head, hiding herself even more within it folds. "Thank you," she said to him. "This is nice."

"That's our little Death Eater," Blaise said. He'd started ladling food into plates. "You can take the rich boy out of his mansion and make him live in a tiny cottage, but you can't make him buy cheap knits." He handed Hermione her dinner. "Ask him why he spends all his days battling dust and ancient records."

Draco sat at the table, his plate in front of him, and glared at Blaise who quirked an eyebrow up and otherwise ignored the fury directed at him. Hermione ate a forkful of the food and made an inquiring noise as she chewed and Draco sighed. "It's a low prestige job," he said at last. "Very dull. Not the sort of thing anyone wants to do who's set on impressing the people who matter."

"Doesn't seem your thing," Hermione said. "You were always such a suck up."

Draco almost choked on his dinner. "I was a suck up?" Blaise snickered from where he'd perched himself on the couch, his own plate balanced on his knees. "'I know the answer,'" Draco said in a dead-on mimicry of Hermione's voice. "'Call on me, Professor, and I'll recite the entire book!'"

"Oh, bugger off," Hermione muttered. "'My father runs the Ministry,'" she said. "'I'm super rich and important.'" She exaggerated Draco's posh accent to the point of absurdity and Blaise laughed openly.

At Draco's furious look he said, "She does rather capture you, I think."

"'Can I do an extra credit essay?'" Draco hissed at Hermione in her voice. "'I only have a 99% in this class.'"

"'Oh, my arm, it hurts so much,'" she retorted. "'Fuss over me a little more, Pansy. That mean monster hurt me because I was an idiot, but I'll have daddy put it to death.'"

Draco curled his hands into fists and had to restrain himself from lashing out at her physically. He missed his father so much. Rather than hitting her, however, he snarled, "'Let me just start up a secret club to teach people because scheduled classes just aren't enough for perfect, perfect, perfect me.'"

"'Why, Professor Umbridge, I'd love to join your Inquisitorial Squad,'" Hermione said. "'I love being mean and cruel and vicious and… and… and…." She turned away and Draco realized with a shock she was trying not to cry.

"Granger," he said, suddenly helpless. He wanted to say, 'I didn't mean it' but, of course, he had.

"Thank you for dinner, Blaise," she said with flawless courtesy, not meeting Draco's eyes. She rose and set the nearly untouched plate on the counter. "If it's all right with you both, I think I'll take over the bath for a bit and have a soak."

"He works in the archives at Hogwarts to avoid being sent out to kill people." Blaise's words followed her and Draco watched her stop at the door to the bath, her hand on the knob. "Maybe we could all try not basing our judgements of one another on who we were at sixteen?"

"Quite right," she said without turning around. "I'm very sorry, Malfoy, if my words caused you any distress. I'm sure you're a very different person now."

When the door had shut behind her and the water had begun to run, Draco hurled his water glass at the wall as hard as he could. "Fuck," he choked out. "Fucking… that… I am," he said turning to Blaise. "I am."

Blaise set his plate on the floor and moved so he could wrap his arms around Draco. "I know," he said as Draco shook. "I know."


	4. Chapter 4

**during**

Hermione had become used to sharing the large bed with both men. The small cottage didn't have room for another place to sleep, and they'd both sworn the couch was lumpy when transfigured to a bed. By the time she'd been strong enough to be able to object to having Draco Malfoy stretched out beside her every night, it seemed ridiculous to complain. At least, she'd think to herself, the bed was large enough she didn't have to touch either of them. She could sleep on the edge of the mattress, and collapse there during the day when the effects of the torture overtook her, and not have to actually cuddle with Malfoy.

She felt his absence when he wasn't there, though. He left a gap where there was usually a watchful, angry man, and a week after their fight, a fight that had been followed by courtesy so formal they'd made the most elite of pureblood social encounters vulgar and rude by comparison, he didn't come home. Blaise offered no explanation and the two of them ate in strained silence. When she said she'd do the dishes he didn't stop her and instead went for a walk. That made the tension worse. Neither man had permitted her to lift a finger for fear she'd overexert herself and now Blaise just said that would be thoughtful, thank you, and let himself out the door.

She pulled the wand they'd gotten her - her wand, now, she supposed - from the drawer where Malfoy had tucked it and charmed the dishes clean and the put them away in the cupboard. Blaise was still walking, so she began to wipe surfaces down and cleaned up dust that wasn't there, and he was still walking so she took a shower even though she knew that would worry him. It was a long shower and her legs were shaking when she was done. He still wasn't back when she was done and dressed in his clothes and had tucked herself into the large bed. Neither was Malfoy.

When she woke she reached a hand out and Malfoy still wasn't there. Her fingers brushed instead against Blaise's arm and he startled and then said, "It's just you, Granger," with disappointment.

"Where is he?" she asked.

Blaise took a deep breath and she could hear the shake he was trying to conceal. "He's off being a Death Eater," he said. "He's out."

She gripped Blaise's fingers in hers at that and he held her hand with a sudden, sharp movement. "How do you bear it?" she whispered. "Knowing he could be hurt, knowing he's out there fighting and you can't help and you can't be there and… at least, I guess, you'll know the outcome. I guess that's something." She didn't know anything about what was happening with her friends. Didn't know if they were alive. Didn't know if they were hurt. Didn't know anything.

"You just do," Blaise said in the darkness. "You endure. It's… what's that Muggle saying about burdens?"

"It's your cross to bear?" Hermione asked.

"That's the one," he said. "You love Draco, this is what you get."

They lay in silence after that, hand in hand, until the door opened and a robed figure, outlined by the moonlight, walked in. "Hi honey," he said. "I'm home," and then he stumbled and fell onto the floor. Blaise lit the lamps and Hermione felt her heart rate jump and her breathing get shallow at the sight of the bland, silver mask concealing Malfoy's face, but she pulled herself to her feet and crossed the room to him anyway. When she pulled the mask off, Draco's grey eyes looked up at her and she shivered. He usually smirked or goaded or just sneered in a way that let her know how much he despised her, but tonight his eyes looked dead.

"What happened?" Blaise asked, his hands on potions bottles. "Are you hurt? Blood?"

"You'll be happy to know," Draco said, his eyes never leaving Hermione's face, "that Neville Longbottom is alive and well."

Hermione swallowed and said, "That's good."

"Bleeding?" Blaise asked again, his tone more urgent this time.

"Arm, I think," Draco said. "I mostly staunched it, but -."

Hermione stripped the robe from him, shoving it down. He had a white linen shirt on under it that was fit only for the rag bin now. She hadn't noticed blood in the dark folds of the robe, but the shirt was cut open and Draco's arm oozed.

Oozing was better than gushing.

"He does have bad aim," Draco said. "Thus my return to your loving embrace." He wavered a bit and Hermione fumbled with the buttons trying to get the shirt off and then, swearing, she grabbed Draco's wand from his hip and used a charm to cut away the fabric. The wound was bad enough, even if Neville had had bad aim, and she set about healing it as Blaise held a blood replenishing potion up to Draco's lips.

"Look at you," Draco said, the words almost a slur, "Perfect Hermione Granger, patching up the big, bad Death Eater. Dirty, dirty, Granger. Next thing, you'll be thinking I'm cute."

"She already thinks you have a good arse," Blaise said. "Stop talking, you've lost a lot of blood."

"You do?" Draco asked her. He looked at the wand in her hand. "Why does my wand work so well for you?"

"Maybe it knows I'm trying to patch up that oh-so-cute, sorry arse of yours," Hermione said. She summoned a wet washcloth from the kitchen area and began dabbing at the blood still on his arm. "What happened?"

"Neville," Draco said. "Didn't recognize anyone else."

"Did you…?" She trailed off.

"Hah," Draco said. He lifted an unsteady hand and lay it across her cheek. "Like I'd lower myself to go after a fat little loser like him." He wiped at the tear that wound its way down her cheek. "Don't cry Granger. Your little Nevvie is fine, lives to fight another day. I'm fine. You're fine. So very fine."

"Anyone not fine?" Blaise asked.

"Someone fell," Draco said. "The masks make everyone the same, though. Not sure who it was, or if they were dead or just down. When we got permission to go, I didn't stick around to find out. Don't care. Let them die. I came back here to you."

Blaise half carried, half dragged the increasingly incoherent Draco to the bed. He mumbled and thanked them and the strain of helping get him under the covers left Hermione on the brink of collapse herself. Blaise didn't seem to notice until she began to go back to the pile of robe and rags on the floor and almost fell herself.

"Don't make me look after you, too," he said. She flushed but took the excuse to leave the blood and mess until the next day and lay down, her head turned so she could see the man next to her.

When she woke in the morning she had her hand splayed across Draco Malfoy's bare stomach as if she'd reached out in the night to reassure herself he was there. She looked over at Blaise who met her gaze. For once he wasn't grouching about how he hadn't had coffee yet and why was it so early.

"Drugged him, did you?" she asked as she pulled her hand back and tried to hide the heat rising in her cheeks. The answer didn't need saying; Blaise had slipped a sleeping draught in with the other potions he'd fed Draco. He surely had a system for handling this by now. She knew it hadn't been the first time.

"Thank you for your help last night," Blaise said, still unusually civil despite the early hour. "I don't know the healing spell you used."

"Anytime," she said. "I can show it to you if you like. I like being useful."

* * *

 **after**

Hermione's eye caught on the half-burned parchment that had fallen off the grate in the fireplace and shifted far enough it had survived last night's blaze. She bent over, planning to move it to the center so it could serve to help light the next fire, but was stopped by the familiar, upper-class penmanship.

Shaking, she pulled it out, shook off the ashes that clung to the sheet, and let her eyes trace the looped letters, formed by a hand that had never held anything quite so plebian as a ball-point pen. She read it three times and, by the end, despite the part of the paper that has crumbled away, she finally understood.

She had never been so angry in all her life.

She has never been so relieved.

She tucked the fragile note into a book Blaise would never open and made herself a cup of tea as the sun rose.

* * *

 **during**

"Do you really think my arse is cute?"

Hermione dropped the spoon into her bowl where it fell with a loud clunk and spun in her chair. She could feel her teeth grit and her jaw tighten, and the way Draco-sodding-Malfoy was smirking at her from the bed only made her tension worse. "Damn you, Blaise," she muttered.

Draco was a lousy patient. He whinged. He wanted attention constantly. His hair was in his eyes. His feet were cold. Could Hermione get him another book? He wasn't even that hurt, in her opinion, but he'd gotten a week's dispensation from someone up the Death Eater food chain to stay and home and recover and he was so irritating that if it hadn't meant sending him back to work with psychopaths she would have told him to get up and get out. As it was she just tolerated him, or tried to.

"Do you need something?" she asked. "Your pillows fluffed? A different slice of apple because that one is just a tiny bit mushy? Some kind of - "

"Just want to know if my cute nurse really thinks I have a nice arse," he said. He leered her as a thought wafted through his very drugged brain. "We could play naughty nurse and you could give me a sponge bath."

"Or we could not," she said. "Your arse is fine." She glared across the room at Blaise who'd passed along her idle comment about Quidditch butts and doomed her to this endless teasing. Blaise was ignoring both her and Draco so she decided to add, "I mean, Blaise's is better, but yours is good enough, I guess." She turned back to her cereal and waited for the explosion.

"What?!"

Draco was nothing if not predictable in his vanity.

"I will have you know I have a grade-A arse," he said. She heard him move around and sighed and turned again only to find herself face to face with a trouser-less Draco, pants around his ankles, mooning her from beside the bed with his very pale cheeks.

"See?" he was saying as she buried her face in her hands and tried not to laugh. "This is a great arse. A perfect arse."

"Yes," she said, giving in to the laugher and barely getting the words out though it. "You are a perfect arse, Draco Malfoy. Exceeds Expectations. Outstanding. " She looked over at Blaise, who was snickering but who had done a better job of containing himself than she had. "Now, for the love of Merlin, get dressed."

* * *

 **later**

Draco kissed the inside of her thigh. "Have I mentioned today you are beautiful?" he asked as she arched under his touch. Blaise sprawled out beside her, lazy and sated. One of his elegant hands toyed idly with her breasts - he never seemed to tire of how he could arouse her with just the lightest touch - but he was far too relaxed to be serious in his efforts and willing to let Draco have his turn to play. She and Draco had, after all, feasted on him until he'd shuddered into his own release, Draco's name on his lips and Hermione's hips held tightly in his grasp.

"Of course you have," he said. "I don't think you go an hour without singing the witch's praises." He yawned. "You are, of course, love. Beautiful. Clever. Perfect. Our bit of light."

Hermione turned her head to look at Blaise, who smiled his enigmatic cat's smile at her before brushing one thumb over her lips. "Everything we ever wanted," he murmured. "Before we even knew it."

"Stop distracting her," Draco complained. He ran his tongue along her folds, teasing with what he could do, what he would do, and she closed her eyes and let their hands and words and touch work their magic. "So beautiful," Draco said and his breath was hot against her.

* * *

 **during**

"Why is she in the yard?" Draco was still toweling off, water collecting in rivulets that ran along the scars on his torso, but he walked across their room and peered out the window. Hermione had settled herself in small chair, well inside the line of rocks that marked the boundary of the Fidelius Charm, and had her nose down in a book. "Merlin, hasn't she already read that one?"

"At least three times," Blaise said. There wasn't much for their patient to do, and now that she was mostly recovered and not spending much of her day asleep, or nearly so, he imagined she was bored out of her mind. She couldn't go anywhere. Couldn't do anything. The difference between this and prison was pretty slim.

"I should pick her up some more books," Draco said. "When I'm back at work."

Blaise tensed. "You got word to go back?" he asked but Draco shook his head.

"You know how I milk these things. Let them think I'm the pansy rich boy who can't take a hit."

Blaise relaxed, even if only marginally. "You know why she's out there, right?" he asked.

Draco's eyes lingered on their houseguest. She sat with her back to the house, her knees pulled up and her book balanced on top of them. She'd pulled her hair up again, baring her neck, and the sun danced off the riot of browns in her curls. As usual, she was in their clothes. "She's pretty," he said quietly. "Funny how I never saw her as a person before this. She was just Potter's annoying sidekick, the Mud… Muggle-born who got better marks than I did. The next woman I had to watch die screaming, worse than most because I'd known her at school, but nothing more than another body. Just someone else I didn't care about who was in my way."

Blaise walked up behind him and rested his hand on Draco's hip. "She is pretty," he said. "Beautiful, even."

"It's hard to not be a monster in my life," Draco said. "Harder, some days. You have to turn things off to survive."

Blaise pressed his lips to Draco's neck and felt the damp skin of the other man's shoulder against his cheek. "She's trying to give us privacy," he said.

"So I should stop wallowing and take advantage?" Draco turned and took Blaise's face in his hands. "It's been a while. Too long."

"Well, we had a sick woman in our bed," Blaise said. "I wasn't quite comfortable ramming into you with her asleep next to us."

Draco laughed at that and took the other man's mouth with his and they stood, framed by the window, and devoured one another. Draco loosened the towel that he'd had draped around his hips and it fell to the floor. Blaise lowered himself, tracing his tongue along the planes of the other man's abdomen before taking the man who'd been his best friend and partner since school into his mouth. It would have been rude not to take advantage of the privacy Granger had so considerately given them.

Draco groaned and dug his fingers into the shoulders of the man at his feet. "Fuck, Blaise," he muttered. "Like that."

Neither of them saw Hermione glance back at the window, or the way her eyes paused on Draco Malfoy's face with his closed eyes and rapt intensity, before she went back to reading her book.


	5. Chapter 5

**during**

It rained. The rain had started sometime in the night and when Hermione had woken up the windows were streaked with water in the dull, grey light. She made herself tea and padded around the small space while the boys slept. Blaise had an arm thrown rather carelessly across Draco, who had burrowed under a pillow like a kitten - or a ferret, she thought uncharitably - and was hiding his head. She smiled at the picture they made and then felt the smile fade as she thought of her other boys.

Where were Harry and Ron? She looked at the drawer where she kept the wand these boys had found her and wondered if she could send a Patronus to let the others know she was fine. I'm safe, she could say. Don't come after me.

She'd never been good at the Patronus charm, though, not even with her own wand. She wasn't sure she'd be able to do it at all with this new one. She should use it more to get accustomed to it instead of pretending she'd get her old one back someday. She wouldn't. And even if she could do the charm, would Harry and Ron listen? Better, she thought, to let them think she was dead if that would keep them from flinging themselves after her, determined to risk themselves to enact a rescue she didn't need.

She settled down on the couch and wiped at her eyes with one hand while she cradled the tea against her chest with the other. She should go soon, though where she wasn't sure. She couldn't stay in Britain and put the very people who'd saved her at risk.

She didn't think she could bear knowing she'd been the reason one of the madmen who reigned supreme had turned their wand on Blaise Zabini, who braided her hair with sure, steady hands and who pretended not to see how weak she still was but who wanted her to leave the door open when she showered 'just in case'. Blaise Zabini, who stayed in this hell for Draco Malfoy.

Draco Malfoy, who'd hated her for years and who had saved her anyway. She couldn't repay that by endangering him.

She just couldn't.

Even if he was an utter arse, and a Death Eater.

She wiped away another stream of water from her face and took a sip of the tea and told herself to buck up, for Merlin's sake. By the time Blaise stirred, rolling out of bed with his usual morning grumble and, she realized, nothing on but an old shirt, she'd gotten control of herself. He saw the way her eyes brushed over the lean thighs that led up into the recesses of grey fabric and he let out a low laugh but pulled on a pair of trousers and poured his own cup of tea without saying a word. Only when he sat down next to her, not quite touching her, did he open his mouth.

"Lousy weather," he said.

"Yeah."

He took one of her curls and wound it around one finger, looked at it for a moment, then let it go. She felt her breath catch in her throat at the simple touch and closed her eyes. When she opened them he had turned to stare out into the rain. "We'll be stuck inside all day," he said.

"Yeah," she said again.

"I never liked you in school," he said. "Odd, really, all things considered, that it turned out to be you they Snatched the night I had to go to the little Death Eater party."

Hermione could feel herself shrivel under those cool, curious words. "I'll try to stay out from underfoot today, then," she said, the words as uninflected as she could make them. "I realize having me here is a burden and I'm very grateful."

"I don't want your gratitude," he said impatiently but she'd already risen and didn't see the way he reached a hand out toward her and then dropped it in evident frustration. "Granger," he said and then, when she didn't turn and just began rinsing her cup out with careful deliberation,"Hermione."

"Yes?"

"You're welcome to stay as long as you need to. You're not… you're not _underfoot_."

"I think I'll take a shower, if you don't mind," she said.

"Just… leave the door," he said. "In case you fall."

She balanced between the warm feeling being cared for had begun to give her and the knowledge he hated her, or disliked her at least. Filthy, filthy Mudblood. She rested her hand on the doorknob and said, "I think I'd prefer to risk it," and then she shut the door behind her.

The tears that stung at her eyes while she let the water pour over her were just because she still hurt physically when she stood for too long. They were just because of that. There was, she told herself as she took soap in her hand and leaned against the cold, tiled wall, no other reason for her to cry.

When she emerged, dressed and dry and ready to put a smile on her face, Draco was up and doing something with eggs that might be considered cooking. "I thought I'd make a full breakfast," he said. "I'm tired of Blaise's morning solution of toast and tea."

"That would be nice," she said. She slipped down into what had become her chair as Blaise muttered something about toast being a perfectly fine morning food.

It was nice. Draco slid a plate with eggs and tomatoes and sausages onto her knees and she began eating. The only sounds in the cottage were Draco piling food onto plates and the relentless thrumming of the water against the roof.

"Fucking rain," Draco said. He'd carried his own plate and stood, leaning against the wall and peering out into the wet day. "I have to go back tomorrow and this is what I get for my last day of sick leave."

"It's cozy," Hermione offered. "The cottage in the rain, I mean." Both men looked at her like she was babbling nonsense and she added as she stabbed a tomato, "You have a nice home, is all. This is better than a tent."

She was chewing when Draco said, "Well, that's certainly true. I wouldn't want to be out in this." She must have made some noise of quiet misery because he made a face and added, "I'm sure they're fine, Granger. They have magic and a tent and no one's going to be out hunting Potter in rain like this."

She swallowed and flashed him a smile that was grateful for all it wavered.

"We could do the jigsaw," Blaise said. Draco's expression became comically distraught as Blaise set his plate aside and rummaged through a cupboard to produce a box which he held up in mock triumph. "And people say I'm nothing but your unfortunate indiscretion," he said. "I have entertainment."

Hermione looked at the box in his hand. At some point a picture had been pasted to the top, but half had long since been torn away. What was left showed old fashioned buttoned up boots that led into an equally old fashioned full skirt. One foot tapped impatiently and a rabbit sat in a corner, twitching its nose. "Do you have all the pieces?" she asked.

Blaise gave her one of his cool smiles. "I suppose we'll find out."

Draco shoved a sausage into his mouth and chewed, muttering after he swallowed, "Jigsaw puzzles would not have been my first choice for what to do on a rainy day."

Hermione looked down at her feet and wished there were some way she could disappear. She suspected he'd rather be lying in bed spending the day alternating between sex and sleep.

"It will be fun," Blaise said. He caught Draco's eye and Hermione saw them flash an understanding between themselves that she was not privy to.

"I suppose it will," Draco said. He chewed the last of his breakfast and added, "My arm hurts, and Granger's still weak after standing for that eternal shower she took. You can do the washing up."

Blaise made a show of grumbling but he pulled out his wand and did just that as Draco took Hermione's empty plate, handed it off, and scooped her out of her chair to set her on the couch. When she started to protest he tapped her on the nose and said, "You're still too weak to stand for that long. You're going to need to lie down at some point, and, if you're already on the couch, I won't have to haul your Muggle-born arse to the bed."

She mustered a glower and he smirked and at last she sighed and said, "Hand me the damn box, Malfoy."

She dumped out the pieces and began turning them so the picture faced up. Draco sat next to her, his leg almost brushing hers, and sorted out the edges. By the time Blaise had put the last of the breakfast dishes away, they'd assembled most of the bottom edge and Draco's commentary about the way she was so inept at all things jigsaw should have had her spitting mad but instead was so over the top she was on the verge of giggles instead. "Honestly, Granger," he said as she tried to fit in another piece. "Anyone could see that doesn't go there. How dense are you?"

The piece hooked in perfectly and she heard herself hoot in petty glee.

Blaise pulled a chair up to the opposite side of the table and eyed them both. "Are you two planning on making this a competitive thing?" he asked. When they both looked up, guilty pleasure on their faces, he rolled his eyes but began working on the edges pieces nearest him.

By the time Blaise offered to put together some sandwiches and crisps, they'd only managed to put together the bottom left corner. A rabbit would hop into the finished section, wriggle its nose, and then, almost mockingly, dart off again, back to the scattered pieces strewn about the table. Hermione realized with some surprise the whole morning had slipped away and the three of them hadn't argued once, unless you counted Draco Malfoy telling her she was an imbecile as he kept a tally of how many pieces he'd added to the growing picture compared to how many she'd added.

Draco Malfoy rather liked to gloat.

She yawned as Blaise stood up and stretched and Malfoy took that opportunity to gloat again. "I told you you still got tired easily," he said.

"Your co-workers tried to kill me," she pointed out.

"Came damn near close, too," he said, and pulled her over until her head rested against his shoulder. "Close your eyes, you idiot woman, until Blaise has more food ready to stuff into your mouth."

She made a token effort to pull away, but he just shifted until she ended up curled on the couch with her head on his thigh as he reached over her to slip another piece into position. "And his lead becomes more substantial," Malfoy said. "Will Draco Malfoy use his opponent's nap to widen the distance between how many pieces he's placed and how many she, still a distant second in this contest, has placed?"

"Of course he will," Hermione said. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Draco Malfoy smelled good.

Of course he did.

"And that's another one," he said. She could feel him lean forward to slip another piece into place; his abdomen pressed into the side of her cheek for a moment and then was gone as he sat back up in smug delight. "You are going down, Granger."

Hermione half dozed until lunch while Draco got several more pieces in, giving him a lead in their contest she was unable to make up during the whole of the afternoon. She sat next to him on the couch and munched on crisps and drank fizzy lemonade from a bottle and built a picture one tiny piece at a time while Blaise laughed at the them both. When at last the picture was completed, she looked at the girl who stood, twirling a parasol and waving at them as rabbits gamboled at her feet. There were even tiny sheep off in the distance, moving about in a clump from one patch of grass to the next. "It's awfully pastoral," Hermione said.

"Idealized country life," Blaise said. He waved a hand to take in their cottage. "At your service, Miss Granger."

A tiny break in the clouds let a ray of light sneak in through a window and the beam settled on the jigsaw.

"It's been a bit of an ideal day," Draco said, taking a last swig from his bottle of lemon fizz. "Tomorrow, back to the trenches of Hogwarts."

"And you said this wasn't how you'd prefer to spend the day," Blaise said, charming the puzzle to stay together and sticking it to the wall.

Draco leaned back against the couch, his fingers laced behind his head, and smirked up at Blaise. "Sometimes I don't know what's good for me until it hits me in the face."

"Or even then," Blaise said.

Hermione looked from one to the other, sure she'd stumbled into some odd inside joke. Blaise raised his brows to give her a measuring look. "You don't remember hitting him?" he asked. "Third year? Made his ears ring." One corner of his mouth tweaked up. "Not that he didn't deserve it."

"I…" Hermione stumbled over what to say to that.

"I wouldn't recommend trying it again," Draco said, his eyes on her. "I've gotten better at ducking, and less prone to running off."

She scooted away from him. There were undercurrents here she was sure she had to be misreading. "Well, you won, Malfoy," she said. "What do you want as a prize?"

Blaise began to laugh and she narrowed her eyes at him which only made him laugh harder. When she looked back at Draco he studied her for a long moment and then said, "Nothing you're likely to agree to, alas."

She forced a smile to her face because she was not ready to think about what that could possibly mean. "Settle for my eternal admiration of your puzzling prowess?"

"I'll always take admiration of my prowess," Draco said.

* * *

 **later**

His body pressed into hers as the water poured over them and she could feel him, hard and eager, even as his partner lowered his mouth to the scar on her shoulder. She tipped her head back so her cheek rested against his perfect skin as his fingers sought her out. Always, always they held her up. Blaise bent down so he could devour her mouth with his own, her whimpers lost against his tongue even as she felt she couldn't bear the combination of mouths and fingers bringing her higher and higher.

"Draco," she said, the words swallowed in Blaise's mouth, "Please."

He moved his mouth from her scar to one breast, cupping the weight of it with the hand he wasn't sliding over her. He pretended not to notice the begging whimpers, though the way he twitched at the sound of them belied his feigned ignorance. He flicked his tongue back and forth across her nipple, running it in circles around the hard flesh before he lifted his head to ask, "How long do you think we can keep her here?" Blaise, one arm firmly bracing her to his body, reaching a hand down to toy with her as well.

"So long," Blaise said. "So, so long."

* * *

 **during**

When Draco got up the next morning, Blaise turned over and yanked the blankets over his head but Hermione sat and watched the pale man get dressed with troubled eyes and without speaking. It was only when he had his hand on the door that she said, "Draco, be careful."

He turned and looked at her, his mouth quirking up into a half smile. "Using my first name, Granger? Next thing you know we'll be cuddling on the couch." He paused and then added. "Again."

She tried to glare but instead just said, "You'd leave me alone, having to comfort Blaise, if you got hurt or died, so don't."

"I'm just sorting old records," he said. She could feel her nerves ease until he said, "Kiss for luck?"

She flung herself back down onto the pillow and pulled the blankets up to the sound of his laughter. After he'd shut the door and couldn't see, she slid her feet over the warmth still lingering where he'd been lying and let it soak into her as she drifted back to sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

**during**

When Hermione opened her eyes again, some time later, Blaise had already rolled out of bed and was making coffee. He obviously hadn't been up long and she suspected the feel of him moving around had been what had nudged her toward wakefulness. She sat up, but before she could even get out of their bed, Blaise had come over and handed her a cup. She took a sip. It was exactly the way she liked it.

"Thank you," she said.

He sat down on the bed and rested his hand on her leg, his thumb moving back and forth over the blankets. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"I'm really fine," she said. This daily update on the Health of Hermione didn't do anything but remind her how weak she was and she hated that. She took another sip. "You make much better coffee than you do dinner," she said. "Why is that?"

"I put more effort into things I care about?" Blaise suggested.

"And you care about coffee," she said.

"Among other things," Blaise agreed, his thumb still moving back and forth across the blankets over her thigh.

"Draco, too," she said.

"Yes." He stood up and retreated a few steps away. "However, since you have developed a care for dinner, and are, or so you say, fine, you can help me make it today."

Hermione laughed and, now that he'd backed off and wasn't hovering over her quite so intently, swung her legs over the edge of the bed and, coffee in hand, made her way to the shower. When she tried to shut the door, Blaise made one of those coughing noises and she turned to look at him. "I'm not going to slip and die," she said. "Stop."

"I just worry," he said. "Don't be careless."

"I'm always careful," she said.

"Except when you got caught," he pointed out. "Except when you got Snatched."

Her smile became somewhat more strained. "Even then," she said as she shut the door, knowing the words were too soft for him to hear.

* * *

 **before**

"Harry is the only thing that matters." The tired old Auror looked around the room at what surely seemed to him to be children. "We can all destroy horcruxes but, in the end, we need Harry to kill He-Who-Can't-Pick-His-Nose."

A ripple of laughter moved around the table in the dingy basement as scarred and dirty fighters spooned dinner into their mouths and drank from chipped mugs.

"No matter what," the Auror repeated, "We protect Harry. Everyone understand?"

Hermione did. They all did.

* * *

 **during**

She spent the morning the way she usually did, a tiger pacing a well-worn path around the perimeter of its cage. She sat in the small area of the garden that was protected. She read the books. She drank so much tea laced with strengthening potions that she thought sooner or later Blaise's regimen would result in her floating away. There just wasn't much for them to _do_. The cottage was small, and two fully trained magic users made short work of what few chores there were. Shortly after lunch, where she'd choked down yet another thing she called a potion and Blaise insisted was tea with just a _dab_ of something extra, he asked if she'd like to try dueling.

She almost dropped her spoon. The man didn't want her showering unsupervised but he was willing to _duel_ her?

"You say you're fine," he told her, setting the wand that was technically hers next to her fingers. "We got you that wand. If you don't start using it for more than making the bed or getting mold out of the shower, you'll never get really used to it."

She picked the wand up and let the power thrum through her. "I just miss my old one," she said. She'd watched the Snatchers break it without any sense of loss. She hadn't expected to live to use another one.

"What was it?" he asked.

"Vine wood," she said. "Dragon heartstring."

"This one is dragon," Blaise said. She nodded. She could tell. When she'd used Draco's to get to his injury, she'd felt the difference the unicorn core made. This one felt similar enough to her old one she'd known it had to be dragon but the different wood just threw her. It wasn't that the wand didn't seem to like her. It was that she wasn't sure she liked having changed enough to suit this wand.

"Hawthorn," she said, tracing her finger along the patterns etched in the wood. The design was reminiscent of ivy climbing up a tree.

"Easiest to claim we were getting Draco a spare," Blaise said. "Had to be similar."

She nodded. "We can try," she said. "Dueling, I mean."

"Nothing dangerous," Blaise said. "Just firstie stuff."

They both knew she'd have to work her way back up to casting things far more dangerous than the simple jinxes every first year Hogwarts student seemed to learn, despite no class every covering them. They just didn't want to talk about _why_ she needed to master that wand. The _just-in-case_ scenario was too frightening; it was safer to treat this as just another step in healing. It was just another potion to drink.

She did cheat, however, when they went out to the garden and used a few spells that most first years wouldn't have known. Blaise blocked them easily and yelled across the garden it was supposed to be _first year_ spells.

"I knew those our first year," she said, panting a little. "Didn't you?" They hadn't come out as cleanly as she would have liked. The wand just felt so different. Not bad, exactly, but like a new pair of shoes. The ways she liked it made her feel like she was betraying the old wand. The ways she didn't made her miss it more.

"Witch," he said. He wasn't even slightly winded but she felt herself warm a little under the admiration in his tone. She shot off a few more children's jinxes before she stumbled over a rock and went down onto her hands and knees on the grass. Blaise was at her side in an instant. "Are you all right?" he asked. He took her hands and inspected the palms for scrapes.

"I'm fine," she said. "I just tripped."

"You're tired," he corrected her. "Nap time."

He scooped her up and carried her, her new wand tucked against his own at his hip. "I feel ridiculous," she muttered. "I handled healing Draco without a problem." She knew intellectually it wasn't the magic that had worn her out, it was the dancing back and forth to avoid Blaise's jelly-legs jinxes and tickling spells.

"Burst of adrenaline," Blaise said. "You also collapsed after." He brushed his lips over her hairline as he set her on the bed. "Just rest. We can work at it every day until your endurance is back. You're learning a new wand, and being on your feet and that working that intensely is tiring."

"My magic is fine," she said. She hated the way it sounded quite so much like a question.

"Better than fine," he told her. "Scary witch. There's a reason I wanted to keep you to children's spells."

"I'd never hurt you," she said as her eyes informed her they would be closing and she would be sleeping now.

She had almost drifted away before she heard him murmur, "Nor I you, dolcezza."

* * *

 **later**

Draco pressed his body against Hermione's, backing her into the wall, and she could feel his arousal even as he slammed his mouth down on hers and thrust his tongue into her mouth. "I have to keep you safe," he muttered between kisses that threatened to swallow her. He raised one hand to caress her face as the other gripped onto her hip. She felt the tell-tale flutter of a post-crucio spasm against her cheek and grabbed at the hand with her own.

"Draco," she said, worried. "What hap- "

"What always happens," he said, cutting her off. "All the time. You know it. I know it. Blaise knows it. It's part of the cost of being a Death Eater and it wasn't that bad today, not really. I just need to be… I need to keep you _safe_." He choked back the emotion and lowered his forehead to hers. "This is all worth it if I know you're safe. I'd do anything, Hermione, anything at all."

"What can I do?" she asked him. "Draco…"

"Just let me forget," he said. "That's all. Let me pretend for just a few minutes that I'm a good man, even if we all know the truth."

She twined her fingers in his fine hair and pulled his mouth back to hers and used arts as old as love to chase away the darkness for at least a little while.

* * *

 **during**

She woke up to Blaise assembling another one of his workmanlike dinners. "I was supposed to help," she said.

He snorted and didn't turn around. "Sleeping Beauty wasn't much noted for being a cook," he said. She scowled at him, an excellent fierce expression that went wholly to waste because he kept his back to her as he boiled vegetables. She sulked and stomped and scowled again as she moved to the couch and picked up the same book she'd read a dozen times and prepared to review it again.

When Draco got back, dusty and blood free, he tossed a new book at Hermione. She flung her hands in front of her face and barely caught it to the sounds of his derisive laughter.

"I guess I know why you never tried out for Quidditch," he said. "That was pathetic."

She glared at him and then looked at the precious book. She'd read everything the pair of them had on their small bookshelf, even the idiotic romance novel, and the promise of something new to alleviate the boredom tantalized her. _The Book of Five Rings._ She blinked a few times, opened the cover, saw the publisher, and looked up at Draco, who watched her with expectant pleasure on his angular face. "This is a Muggle book," she said, not sure if he realized that.

"Exactly why I thought bringing it to the Dark Lord's attention might be unwise," he said. "Muggle books in his precious Hogwarts? Heads would roll." His smirk became somewhat smaller and Hermione blanched at the realization of exactly whose head might roll if Voldemort decided it was somehow _Draco's_ fault a Muggle book had ended up on a shelf at Hogwarts.

She flipped through it and her hands began to tremble. "This is…this is a military strategy book," she said. "This isn't something you give to a woman on the other side of your war."

"I thought about another romance," Draco said, not quite answering the question she didn't quite ask, "but the last one didn't seem to be your thing."

"No," she admitted, drawing the word out. Her preference for useful books - boring books, her roommates had called them - was something her friends had known for years. It surprised her Draco Malfoy had noticed and thought to bring her something that would interest her; he could have just binned it. She looked back down at the picture of a Japanese warrior on the cover, then back up at Draco and realized, with a start, that this mattered to him. He stood there fretting under his smirk with worry that she wouldn't like what he'd brought her. "Thank you," she said. "That was very thoughtful."

Blaise tweaked the book out from under her greedy fingers and flipped through it. "Strategy, huh?" he said. "I suppose inserting pretty girls into all the Death Eater households to suborn the ranks is listed in here somewhere."

Hermione snorted at the notion she was pretty. Draco lowered himself to sit next to her and said, "I wouldn't recommend it. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience for most of those girls."

"You mean not every Death Eater goes about rescuing the down-trodden?" Hermione asked him.

His flippant smile struggled to survive. "Not really, no," he said.

"Theo, maybe," Blaise said.

Hermione tried to remember who Theo was and could only recall a skinny boy in her advanced Potions class, his head down with Draco and Blaise, a sneer on his narrow face. His father, she recalled, had been one of the Death Eaters exposed at the Department of Mysteries. Her hand crept, without volition, to play with the scar on her shoulder and she swallowed hard.

Draco didn't seem to notice but Blaise did and his eyes followed the movement of her hand.

"Theo took the Mark after the Battle of Horwarts," Draco said and Hermione focused on the way the man was giving her information, giving her _intelligence_. "He vomited afterward - a lot of people do - and we haven't spoken of it since. He was there when you were… he was there the night we brought you home."

"Another childhood friendship, lost," Blaise said. "He was a good guy, but - "

"You can't trust anyone," Draco said. "Not anymore." He leaned his head back and looked up at the ceiling. "Everyone will betray you for the right price, or with the right threat hanging over their head, even a man you raced brooms with at five."

"Not me," Blaise said.

"No," Draco said. "You I'd trust with my life." He turned his head so he was looking at Hermione. "You too," he said.

She stared back at him, gobsmacked. "But you don't even…" she started to say and then trailed off.

"If you were going to send a message to your friends to come and kill me in my sleep, another Death Eater gone, you'd have done it by now," Draco said, his eyes never wavering from her face. "You have a wand, for all you don't use it much, and mine seems to like you well enough so you could have used it. You could have gotten word out."

"We used the wand today," she said. "Blaise and… and I wouldn't do that."

"Noble fucking Gryffindors," he agreed. He reached a hand over and brushed his fingers across her cheek. "So I trust you."

"Despite my birth," she said.

"Right," Draco said, and pulled his hand away. "What's for dinner, anyway? I skipped lunch today; didn't want to face the ranks of students in the Hall trying to be invisible whenever I walked by."

Blaise sighed. "I need to go shopping," he admitted. "I didn't want to leave Granger here alone in case she… well, she's still weak and - "

"I'm _fine_ ," Hermione said, interrupting him. Now she understood why he'd been reduced to boiling vegetables. She hated the way they wouldn't leave her alone some days. Some days it made her feel cared for in a way she wasn't used to and wasn't sure she was comfortable with. "You don't need to babysit me, Blaise."

Her protest would have been more effective if her hand hadn't taken that moment to start shaking. She forced it down on the cover of the book in front of her as her jaw began to tremble too.

"Hermione," Blaise began.

"Don't be such a stubborn bitch," Draco said. "You aren't fine."

"You're better," she said, still fighting back tears. "Your arm is better and you're off at work and I'm still - "

"They tried to kill you," he said. The words were loud, almost a roar, and she shrank back under the unexpected force. "Neville was fighting, he was attacking me, but it was… it was an _honorable_ hit. Those people were _playing_ with you. They didn't just want to hurt you, they wanted to make it last."

"I don't know how you survived," Blaise said. "It was the worst thing I've ever seen."

"Granger," Draco took a deep breath and lay his hand over hers. "You have your mind. You can walk. You can - "

"Is this as good as it's going to get?" she asked and the words were tiny even in the small cottage. "Am I never going to be - "

"I don't know," he said. That's when the tears started to really fall and she could feel them trickle down her skin, itching a little as they fell off the end of her nose. She wanted to wipe at them but Draco's hand still lay over hers and she also didn't want to push him away. "I've never seen anyone live through something like that."

He took his free hand and wiped at her cheek and that was when she crumbled and sagged against his chest and wept as he wrapped awkward hands around her shoulders and patted at her back and her tears soaked into his shirt. "I've got you," he said at last. "It will be okay, Granger."

"We've both got you," Blaise said.

* * *

 **later**

Draco lay with his arm lightly draped across the witch at his side. He'd learned not to hold her with any pressure or she panicked. She couldn't lie between him and Blaise or she felt trapped. He'd playfully put his hands over her eyes one day as Blaise unbuttoned her shirt and she'd closed in on herself and gone from laughing partner to fragile and terrified in a moment. "I'm sorry," she'd whispered, apologizing all that afternoon for being afraid. He knew it wasn't him. She trusted him. The Snatchers, however, had kept her blindfolded from the moment they'd caught her until she'd been granted sight again, only to look up into a ring of silver masks.

Some things you never really escaped.

Blaise's hand brushed against his shoulder. "You didn't say much at dinner," the man said.

"I killed people today," Draco said. "It doesn't leave me talkative."

Blaise's fingers tightened. "We're here for you," he said. "If you ever wanted to talk, we'd both listen."

"I don't," Draco said. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you for all your kind words and responses. Your reviews and comments make my days brighter!**


	7. Chapter 7

**during**

"I'm just losing my mind," Hermione said. She was at the counter with Blaise, watching the knife chop carrots into meticulously exact slices, and she was bored. She was bored and cooped up and afraid.

"I could take you shopping," Blaise offered, though the way he braced himself while making the suggestion made his opinion on that clear. He thought going out into public was risky to the point of madness. "We could make Polyjuice and turn you into some unremarkable half-blood from the country and - "

"Papers," Draco said. Hermione spun around and looked at him. "You don't have _papers,"_ he said. "No identification, nothing. If you were really some provincial half-blood, you'd be questioned and released, but do you really think a woman with your hair, covered in curse scars, isn't going to - "

"Polyjuice," Blaise said again.

"Standard procedure is to keep all suspects isolated from food or drink long enough for any disguise to wear off," Draco said. "She's got no papers - "

"I could forge some," Blaise said.

But the thought of being stopped and questioned, asked for her papers, sweating as some Snatcher examined the forgery, held in a cell until the Polyjuice wore off, at which point she'd be killed, made Hermione start to shiver. "Maybe that's not a good idea," she said. "I should be braver - "

"You should be sensible," Draco said and looked back down at the documents he'd brought home to read.

Blaise came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her so she could feel the heat of him along her back and his hands resting, crossed, over her stomach. "I would be afraid, too," he said.

She let herself soak in the comfort for a moment before stepping away and turning back to the dinner preparation. She wasn't in any sense a better cook than Blaise. She was probably worse. She just needed something to do. "I just hate not knowing," she said. "It's like I'm in a bubble here and Harry could be _dead_ and I wouldn't know."

Draco didn't even raise his head. "Your precious Potter is fine."

The lack of concern irritated her. She was trapped here and he got to go out and go to Hogwarts every day and see people and she remained stuck here in this perfectly lovely cottage that might as well be a prison. "And you would know that how?" The words came out sharper than she intended but she didn't take them back or turn to see how Draco reacted to her biting tone. She just kept making another bland dinner.

She heard a sigh. "Because if anyone captured or killed Potter, there would be a party at Ye Olde House of Psychopaths to end all parties. It would be all over the papers. 'Undesirable Number One Eliminated.' No one has celebrated his demise. Ergo, it hasn't happened. Assuming he hasn't just fallen into a crevice to die in obscurity, which given Potter might be a bit of an assumption, I admit, he's fine."

Hermione could feel tension she hadn't known she was holding release. "How would I know that?" she bit out. "I don't get the papers."

Blaise set a hand on her shoulder. "You don't want them," he said. " _The Daily Prophet_ … it isn't exactly unbiased."

"By which he means it's in the pocket of the Dark Lord," Draco said.

"Or up his arse," Blaise muttered, pulling an unwilling smile to Hermione's face.

"I still want to read it," Hermione said.

She could hear Draco banging his head against the wall behind the couch but she refused to dignify his dramatics by turning around. He could get a headache if he really wanted to. She couldn't stop him.

"Fine," he muttered at last. "I'll get you copies. Happy now, you stupid witch?"

* * *

 **later**

"What makes you think she would agree to that?" Blaise demanded.

Draco just looked at him. They both knew she'd never agree.

* * *

 **during**

After dinner, Blaise and Draco exchanged one of the looks they gave each other and Hermione felt that teeth grinding frustration that they were so close and she was always a step behind, always the one trailing after their innate understanding of one another. Blaise cleared the table and opened the top cupboard and pulled out an unremarkable old box tied up with twine.

"If things get bad," he said, then stopped and opened the box. She peered inside and shrugged. It was a battered, wooden bird, a pelican she thought. Someone had probably once thought it was a good idea, some sort of decorative object. That someone had been wrong.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Portkey," Draco said. Her eyes widened. "Unregistered and hideously illegal, of course, but - "

"It will take you right to a villa I own in Italy," Blaise said. "A place you'll be safe."

"A place where I don't speak the language," she said, but she was impressed they had it, and something tightened in her throat that they were sharing it with her. "Not without you," she said at last. "I couldn't… I couldn't just leave you here."

"Merlin," Draco muttered, "the pair of you. Could you be more alike? Saving your own skin isn't the worst thing in the world."

Blaise began tying the unprepossessing box up again and ignored Draco. "If you need it," he said to Hermione. "Don't hesitate."

* * *

 **before**

Blaise swung the bag up onto the table. "How was Italy?" Draco asked.

Blaise didn't answer at first. He just busied his hands putting the jars of food and the loaf of bread he'd brought back with him into their cupboards. He'd gone down into the village near the small house he owned and walked through the Wednesday market. He picked up the salame he'd snuck back into the country and weighed it in his hand. Italy is paradise, he wanted to say. The house is clean. The sun is bright. Children go running through the streets without fear. They don't have a half-mad dictator who thrives on pain making the rules.

"It was fine," he said. "The same. Missed you, though." He tossed the salame to Draco. "Put this away, would you?"

"Is that a hint?" Draco asked, and with a laugh Blaise let his partner capture his mouth and let their kiss drive away all the thoughts of what could be if only things were different.

* * *

 **during**

True to his word, Draco brought a copy of _The Daily Prophet_ home the following night. He then proceeded to distract her the entire evening so she couldn't read it. Hermione recognized his ploys, but a Draco determined on being charming was almost irresistible. He asked if she had ever baked, then, looking her over, said, "I mean, it's obvious that you've never eaten a biscuit, Granger, given how scrawny you are, but do you know how to make them?"

She hit him on the arm and he rolled his eyes and asked, "What is it with you and hitting people?" He sulked and pouted to such an extent that, as used to Draco's dramatics as she was, and as much as she knew she'd barely tapped him, she still reached over and rubbed the spot she'd smacked in silent apology. The motion went on and on until it became uncomfortable and she stood there as he smirked at her while she ran her hand back-and-forth in growing appreciation over his very hard and obviously fit upper arm.

It was only when Blaise began to laugh that she yanked her hand back with a muttered yes, she certainly did know how to make biscuits. And they did, or they tried, at least. Blaise broke an egg all over the floor of the small kitchen and had to clean it up, Draco lectured her on the appropriate measuring techniques for dry versus wet ingredients, and the pair of them laughed so hard at the sight of her scraping batter out of the bowl with a spoon and getting it on her nose that tears came out their eyes. The entire evening passed in delightful conviviality and, before she knew it, she was lying in bed, one of Draco's hands resting on her shoulder, and the night had passed without a single opportunity to look at _The Daily Prophet_.

She read it the next morning, after Draco had gone off to avoid murder in the dusty, forgotten corners of Hogwarts, over another cup of the perfect coffee that Blaise made. She read it and grew angrier and angrier with every passing article. Some praised the new, streamlined government that had eliminated corruption. One was a society article about the beautiful wives of the Knights of Walpurgis and their expensive wardrobes. She thought of Narcissa Malfoy, certainly a woman who had spared no galleons when it came to her own attire, now dead. Draco hadn't shared the details of that with her, but Hermione doubted the woman had passed away due to natural causes.

"I did warn you," Blaise said as he sipped his own coffee and watched her fume and grind her teeth while she turned yet another page of the paper that was spread out before her on the table, her gesture even shorter and angrier than the one that had almost torn the previous page. He reached out and snagged the Quidditch section while she ran her eyes across the text. This page featured an opinion piece. It was a despicable opinion piece.

"Who is worse," she read aloud from the paper. "The Mudblood or the blood traitor?"

She was about to ask Blaise whether or not he could believe that this tripe was being printed, but he just said, his brain clearly elsewhere, "Blood traitors, of course."

Hermione would have sworn that the phrase 'you could feel your jaw drop open' was an exaggeration, but her mouth actually did fall open and she could feel it happen. She looked at the man she had grown to like and trust, and maybe a bit more, during her recovery. He wasn't even paying attention to her as he looked over Quidditch scores.

"Oh," she said. Harry would have known to have been wary of that tone. Ron would probably have started running. Blaise, however, for all he'd saved her, didn't know her that well yet. "Why is that, exactly?"

"You know," he said, still paying more attention to what the Chudley Cannons were doing than to her. "You can't really help what you're born, of course, but you certainly have control over whether or not you're a Muggle-lov-."

He cut himself off in the middle of the last word, as if for the first time he heard what he was saying. He looked up at her with guilt filling his eyes. "I don't mean that the way it sounds," he said.

"Oh?" she said again. This time it looked from his expression as though he might have cozened onto the fact that he was in trouble. "Maybe you could explain yourself, then, if it doesn't mean _exactly_ the thing it sounds like."

"It's just that," he said and then cut himself off. He tried again and got out, "It's just that Muggles are," and then he stopped.

"Oh?" she said for the third time. "What, exactly, are Muggles?"

There was a long pause while he searched in vain for the right answer.

"Are they filthy and disgusting animals?" she asked. "Are they subhuman Do tell me, Blaise, what _exactly_ is it that makes Muggles so despicable?"

He opened his mouth, then shut it.

She folded up the paper with a neat, precise gesture. "Maybe we could duel?" she asked. "You were right. This is nothing but a filthy rag. My time would be better spent getting better." So I can leave, she added to herself.

Blaise set his coffee aside and met her in the yard. She couldn't help but think that Harry would never have been stupid enough to face her with a wand in her grasp after that conversation. Ronald would probably have tried to engage in some kind of sleight-of-hand to get it away from her. Harry would have used expelliarmus. It was, after all, his signature move.

"Let's limit ourselves to things we used in Hogwarts," Blaise said.

Hermione let a smile creep over her face. "That seems fair," she said. She case her first curse at him. He jumped back in shock as the spell lit the hem of his shirt on fire. "Did I ever tell you," she asked conversationally as she fired off another curse, this one the Avis charm that loosed small birds from the tip of her wand, "I set Professor Snape on fire once. It was our first year." She added an oppugno charm to the birds and they flung themselves at Blaise trying desperately to attack him. "Good times," she said.

He warded off the birds. "When the fuck did you use that?" he demanded. He launched a curse of his own at her so halfheartedly that she blocked it easily.

"I attacked Ron with that one," she said. "I do have a question though. Should I limit myself to curses that I used, or can I use ones that Harry cast as well? I know we were just a group of Mudbloods and filthy blood traitors, worthless and subhuman and all, but we did seem to have a bit of a knack for magic."

She launched another curse at him, not the sectrumsempra she'd been thinking of, but something that was still pretty nasty. She didn't want to kill him; she just wanted to lash out and some part of her brain knew she'd regret it if she left him bleeding in the dirt. He'd lived through the same war she had. She felt reasonably confident he knew shielding charms. He did, and he blocked her curse and then tried to summon the wand out of her hand. She avoided that with ease. You didn't spend any time with Harry without learning to counter that one.

"You're angry at me," he said as he launched another trivial curse at her and she blocked it. "Hermione, you have to understand –."

"I don't have to understand anything," she said. "I just need to get well and get out of here."

That was when the exhaustion hit her the way it always did after too much time on her feet, and she cursed Snatchers and Death Eaters and torturers and her own body's lack of resiliency for the way she stumbled. Blaise was at he side in an instant. "Are you okay?" he asked. "You pushed yourself too hard, didn't you?"

She wrenched herself out of his caring grasp. "Fuck you," she said. "I don't need the help of a stinking blood purist."

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - Hi._**


	8. Chapter 8

**during**

When Draco got home, he apparated into the yard to find Hermione still sitting in the sun. Her arms were crossed and she was glaring off into the wooded area that surrounded the small cottage. She had refused to go inside all day, though she hadn't put a toe past the line that marked the edge of the Fidelius charm.

"Something wrong?" Draco asked her.

"No," she said.

He didn't question the obvious lie, just pushed his way into the cottage where Blaise was standing at the window, his eyes fastened on Hermione. He'd tried to bring her soup at lunch and she thrown it all in his face. He tried to get her to come and she'd leveled her wand at him and told him to go away. He had never seen her sulk but he was used to Draco, and so he backed off and just watched her, guilt and worry warring.

"Dare I ask?" Draco asked.

"Read the paper," Blaise said without moving or looking away from the woman in the yard.

Draco walked across the room and picked up _The Daily Prophet_ , still sitting on the table where Hermione had left it. "Is there any specific article in this fine, upstanding example of journalism that I should be reading?" Draco asked.

"The editorial page," Blaise said shortly.

Draco read the article, set the paper back down, and said, "This doesn't explain why our witch is sitting in the yard and pretending everything is fine."

"I made a mistake," Blaise said. Draco came up behind him, rested a hand on the other man's lower back, and listened as Blaise explained. He let out a low whistle at the story of how Hermione had attacked.

"So, now," Blaise concluded, "she's set on getting better and taking off, to hell with both of us."

"That's not acceptable," Draco said.

For the first time Blaise looked away from the window. His brown eyes met gray ones and he said, simply, "I'm sorry." Draco could hear the layers behind the two words and he nodded. Ideas they'd long ago realized you couldn't speak out against, ideas they'd grown up believing to be as true as water being wet, those ideas had wrought a world they both hated. Nevertheless, they sometimes still both parroted them without thinking.

Draco sighed and looked back at Hermione. She'd started to shiver and had wrapped her arms around herself. "Fucking great," he muttered. She was going to make herself even weaker than she already was. "Give me a couple of hours and I'll get it… I'll get her inside, at least."

She didn't even turn her head when he went back outside and stood near her. "Do you plan to sit out here all night?" he asked. She pulled her wand on him, much as Blaise had reported she'd done to him, but Draco took a step forward, sure she wasn't actually going to curse him at this range, and twisted it out of her grasp. She made a furious, frustrated noise and he lay a palm against her cheek as she glared at him. "Try to remember I'm a Death Eater," he said. "I get shot at all the time. I'm a little less thrown by having a wand pointed at me than Blaise is, and a little better at disarming people." He kept his voice level despite the way his throat clenched at the dirty tracks on her face, evidence of tears she hadn't bothered to wipe away.

"I trusted him," she said and her voice betrayed the hoarse burr it would probably always have when she was upset, a life long echo of the screaming she'd done when she'd been Snatched. "I trusted _you_ , and you're both - "

"The same people we were last night," Draco said. He reached down and took her hand. "Maybe not the same people we were a few years ago, but habits die hard. Come inside."

"I'll stay here," she said.

Draco tugged on her hand and she glared and he remained calm and their silent battle of wills went on until he said, "I do have your wand and I am stronger so, eventually, I'm going to be the bully and make you come in. It would be more pleasant for both of us if you just walked."

"I hate you," she said, and he didn't even bother to control the way he flinched at that. She saw and that was what finally made her let him pull her up. "Why?" she asked him.

He didn't answer until he had her on the couch, a blanket around her, and the soup she'd refused at lunch reheating on the stove. "It's too cold to stay outside," he said.

"You hate me," she said. "I'm worthless to you. Why save me?"

"Blaise wanted to," he said. He pulled a chair up so he sat directly opposite her. "I would have let you die."

The words hung there and she looked like he'd slapped her for a moment, and then braced herself. He took a deep breath and went on. "I know you realize you're a death sentence. I wouldn't have taken that risk. I wouldn't have taken _any_ risk, much less one centered around a woman I'd never liked, and who'd never liked me." He settled a hand on the blanket over her knee and counted it success she didn't jerk away from him. "We disliked one another personally, Granger."

"Hermione." She said the name automatically and he nodded.

"We disliked each other _personally_ , Hermione, you and me. It wasn't just a blood status thing. Would you have risked everything to save me?"

She opened her mouth and he suspected she'd been about to protest that of course she would have, but she closed it again and finally gave the tiniest shake of her head.

"It was Blaise, who opened his mouth and echoed the worst garbage of our childhoods at you, he was the one who decided we couldn't just let you die. _Blaise_ , who spent the whole day, I think, watching you. _Blaise_ , who grew up the same way I did."

"Thinking people like me are trash," she said.

"And that Muggles are dangerous." He bowed his head and didn't watch her face as he talked and talked and told her about the witch burnings that still dominated most family stories of Muggles, and the fear, and the nightmare scenario many grown witches and wizards didn't talk about but watched for, one where Muggles found out about the magical world and turned on it. There were so many Muggles. If magic users weren't careful they'd become a hunted minority, or so they feared. They had magic, yes, but Muggles had numbers, and it was so much easier to just hate the thing that was different. And Blood Traitors, they didn't see it that way. Maybe they were right, maybe they were naive, but Draco admitted to her he was willing to bet on fear and hate winning. "I've just seen so much of it," he said.

"Me too," she whispered, and when he looked up she was crying again though, of course, so was he. "I tried to curse him."

Draco snorted at that. "You didn't," he said. "Not really."

"I set him on fire," she said.

Draco moved to the couch and pulled her into his chest and held on to her. "You didn't try very hard," he said. "I'd like to think if you went after an actual Death Eater, you'd be a little more effective. He said you were easy enough to block."

"I usually was," she said. "Effective, I mean."

"You were just hurt," he said. He tried not to think about this woman in a battle, possibly in a battle against him. He'd have tried to kill her, he was sure, or at least make a good showing of it. He'd cast more than one Avada at the ground after people had disappeared. He'd cast more than one at opponents, however. The thought he might have cast one at her was unbearable.

"Blaise must hate me."

The words were muffled but he still understood them and he rest his cheek against her hair and said, "No. I can guarantee he doesn't hate you." The soup was steaming and he pressed his lips into the top of her head and inhaled before setting her aside and getting up to fetch dinner. When he handed her the bowl she sniffled and he pulled out a handkerchief and passed that over as well.

She took it with a muttered, "How do you always have one of these around?"

"I'm a pureblood aristocrat, obviously," he said. "I'm better than you." It took her a moment and he could watch her begin to bristle before she realized he was teasing her. A tiny light came back into her eyes at that and the corner of her mouth began to move upward again.

"Prat," she said as she mopped at her face and nose. "Git."

"I know," he said. "But I'm trying to be less of one." He sat next to her and stretched his feet out to rest on the chair he'd been in when he'd first set her down and summoned over his own bowl. He could tell by the taste Blaise had slipped a bit of Calming Draught into it when he'd made it at lunch. "Blaise is trying too."

* * *

 **before**

Blaise posed in the doorway of their small bathroom, one hand on the wooden frame, another on his hip where it held the towel around his waist in place. Draco looked up from the cereal he was shoveling into his mouth and let his eyes roam up and down the body presented for his approval. "Behold," Blaise said, "the beauty of my pure, magical blood. Can all this be wrong?"

Draco snorted at that though he didn't stop enjoying the view. "You don't believe that horse crap any more than I do these days."

Blaise put a mock look of horror on his face. "Are you telling me you aren't a true believer in the modern line of thought?"

Draco set his spoon down, the last bite of breakfast eaten, and leaned back so he could leer more effectively. "I am absolutely a true believer," he said. "The powers that be are clearly wise and rational people, and there's no way prolonged exposure to them would make me do anything but agree more fervently with the tripe they spout."

Blaise laughed. The only place either of them could be even passingly honest, even in sarcasm, was at home. It wasn't safe to ever disagree with the party line and neither of them were the type to tilt at windmills. And, in all honesty, he still recoiled a little at the notion a person born of Muggles could be wholly untainted. When Thorfinn Rowle held forth, however, on the pureblood ideology and you looked at him - thick, slow, and magically weaker than any number of half-bloods they all knew - it was hard not to think anything this man believed had to be wrong.

If Thorfinn Rowle said it was raining out, Blaise wouldn't trust it until he double checked for himself.

"Oh yes," he said now. "You work with people who couldn't ever possibly be wrong. And one look at this body should prove the point."

"The point being you're vain?"

"The point being you're lucky."

"I'd like to get lucky," Draco said.

"And me naked," Blaise said. "Good timing."

* * *

 **during**

When Blaise returned, perhaps a little drunker than was wise in the current world but not nearly as drunk as he felt like being, Hermione had collapsed into a drugged slumber. Blaise eyed the empty soup pan, the two bowls, the bed, and snorted. Draco had managed to knock himself out too it would seem, and lay next to the woman, not quite touching her. His hand reached out as though he'd meant to brush his fingertips against her shoulder but lost his nerve and instead just let them settle an inch away.

After Blaise weaved his way through the discarded shoes that were strewn across the floor, noting that they seemed more of a hazard than usual, he squatted next to the bed. Hermione hadn't even taken off her clothes. Between wearing herself out fighting with him and the Calming Draught he'd slipped into the soup, she hadn't even gotten her jumper off. He thought about tugging it over her head but decided, as he almost fell over, that that might not work out well. He wasn't sure he could successfully get it off without yanking her hair and waking her up in his current state. If he woke her, it was possible she'd panic and try to curse him again and this time she might even mean it. Best to leave her in the jumper.

He steadied himself with a hand against the mattress and leaned his forehead against her hair. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean it. Not really." He could feel his mouth twist and contort as he controlled the sob that threatened to escape. "I'll do better," he promised the sleeping woman. "I will."

* * *

 **later**

Hermione lay her cheek along Draco's arm and he made a grouchy noise as he pulled her hair out of his face. "I wish you didn't have to go," she said. "I worry. We both do."

"I don't have a choice," he said. He pretended he didn't notice the wetness where her tears soaked through his sleeve. He liked to pretend she just worried about him being hurt. She'd patched him up enough times to know the battles were real and the other side had stopped using body bind curses a long time ago.

Her side.

The side he was being sent out again to murder. He always came back and told her who he'd seen, if he'd recognized anyone, and that they were fine. They were always fine. He suspected the Order of the Phoenix had a nasty Felix Felicis addiction problem by now given how things always seemed to go their way, but at least it meant he'd never have to come back and tell her he'd seen Harry Potter, glassy eyed and dead. He knew she lived in fear of that.

"I'll be fine," he said when she didn't respond. "I'm always careful, you know that."

"I just… I hate not being useful," she said. "I'm stuck here and I can't go… everyone thinks I'm dead and…"

"We talked about that," Blaise said from where he sat. They had. She'd wanted to let at least Harry - just Harry, she'd promised - know she was alive. How would you feel if you'd believed I was dead, she's demanded, and then found out I was just in hiding?

"I'd rather think you were dead and have you survive," Draco had said. Potter's potential hurt feelings were the least of his concerns. "I could endure heartbreak until the end of the war - endure it forever - if that meant keeping you safer."

"If Potter's captured," Blaise had said, "I want his brain to believe you're dead."

"Draco," she said, then stopped, helpless. There was nothing she could say or do to protect him and she knew it. The war dragged on and he was at risk on the battlefield and at risk from his own side. When the Dark Lord was in a bad mood he'd stumble in and collapse and she'd scrape him off the floor and feed potions into him until he could put the mask on again and play the role he was condemned to. "Kiss me before you go," she said, like she did every time.

"And again when I come back," he promised, like he did every time.

She sat up and he rested a hand on each damp cheek and pressed his lips to hers. She was soft and pliant and, as her hands wound through his hair, increasingly urgent. The gentle touch became fierce and demanding and he could feel himself cling to her as if her mouth could save him.

"My turn," Blaise said, and he turned to the man and felt the rough scrape of stubble against his skin and had to fight to keep himself from breaking down and sobbing because the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to walk away from the pair of them and it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair.

Not, of course, that it had escaped him that life was not fair. Not to anyone.

He stood up and slipped his arms into the robe and put the Death Eater mask on over his face. When he looked back at the bed Blaise had his arms around Hermione and they both watched him as if this was the last glimpse they'd ever get.

"I'll see you when it's over," he said, and left.

* * *

 **during**

Blaise had stayed away until after she'd fallen asleep, and she'd left the door to the shower open in an odd, silent apology in the morning. It seemed a tiny way to let him look after her the way she knew he felt almost compelled. It was a way to show she did trust him after all.

When she was done, and dressed, and standing in front of the mirror trying not to hate the way she looked, trying not to hate her hair or the way she looked tired all the time now, he knocked on the cracked door and then pushed it open.

He watched her in the mirror for a few minutes and then took her hands in his own and wrapped his arms around her. "I'm sorry," he said, and then, "You're beautiful."

"I'm just a Mudblood," she muttered. His arms clenched around her at her choice of words and she studied the slanting dark eyes in his reflection. He looked angry, though whether at her or himself she couldn't tell. "Do you still think of me as filth, even if you don't want to?"

He met her eyes for a long moment before he picked her up, spun her around, and settled her bottom on the edge of the sink. She wobbled and had to wrap her legs around him to keep from feeling like she would fall off that perch. The intimacy of the pose made her mouth dry and her heart race as Blaise set his hands on her shoulders, brushed the hair she hadn't managed to tame out of her face, then put his hand back again. She wavered between being still angry at him, guilty she'd hexed him, and fascinated by his mouth.

"I was raised to have immense pride in my heritage," he said.

"I am aware," she said, the words sullen and ungracious after their conflict of the day before. He ignored them.

"It's something, in our world, to be able to say that your magical ancestors did this thing hundreds of years ago, or that thing." There was a pause and she could hear the dripping of the faucet and the sound of Draco moving around in the other room.

"It still comes down to you hating me," she said. "You hate me because of something I can't change about myself any more than I can change my hair. I'm not one of your precious aristocrats with your generations of magical ancestry and so I'm nothing."

"Do you plan to hold schoolboy prejudice against me forever?" the words were soft and, when she met his eyes, the question was real. "I wouldn't blame you if you did," he said. "But I wish you… tell me how to atone, Hermione Granger, for being who I was taught to be at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. Tell me how to make you see me as a person and not as part of a wall of undifferentiated hate." He tilted his head and bent down so his lips were almost brushing against her skin and she shivered. "Teach me forgiveness," he said. "Reclaim me."

"Draco," she said. "You… he - "

"He does not care," Blaise said. "We are not each other's keepers that way." He leaned his forehead against hers. "Tell me no and I stop."

She opened her mouth to tell him that this was a terrible idea. That he and Draco kept each other from drowning, when Blaise whispered, "Let me be first, Hermione. Call it an apology for ruining my shirt."

She licked her lips and, shaking, nodded.

His mouth was soft. That was the main thing she thought. She ran her hands up his arms where hard muscles curved between her fingers and she wrapped arms around him until, with arms and legs both holding on to him, he laughed against her mouth and she smiled back, her curving lips opening to admit his tongue and they were kissing and they were kissing and they were kissing and it was as if the day before hadn't happened, only it had to have for them to have moved past awkward glances and touches that lasted a moment too long. She laughed again with delight and joy and pressed herself against his with even more fervor and he responded by tightening his hands on her and that soft mouth was hard and she realized she was making little whimpering sounds as he dug his fingers into her and made her feel adored.

"Merlin, you two," Draco drawled from the door, interrupting the moment. "Get out."

"You okay?" Blaise asked. He loosened his hands somewhat but the question seemed more for Hermione's benefit than his or Draco's.

"I want use the room for what the architect intended," Draco said. "Who the hell snogs a woman in the toilet?"

"You're not upset?" Hermione started to ask as Blaise put his hands under her arse and carried her as he slid past the man in the doorway.

"Wanted to be first," Draco said before he closed the door in her face. "You claim he's got the better arse after I show you mine, and now you snog him first. Bastard."

But he was smiling. And so was she. And so, as he carried her to the couch so he might continue on, was Blaise.


	9. Chapter 9

**during**

Kissing Blaise became all of her days. He'd come up behind her as she wiped counters in an attempt to be more than a recovering victim and press his lips to her neck, trace his tongue along the lines of her throat, kiss her until she wasn't sure whether the weakness in her legs was because of what she'd suffered or what she reveled in. He'd scoop her up and press her back against a wall, her legs wrapped around his waist, as he tasted her whimpering mouth.

Draco just laughed at them both. She waited for him to jealous or spiteful or vindictive, but all he'd do was smirk at the way Blaise ran a hand possessively down the length of her back. She realized, however, how much they'd censored their own daily affection with one another in her presence now that they stopped, as if Blaise deciding she was there to be kissed meant he and Draco could now be more open in their own relationship. Blaise slid a hand across Draco's arse with the same casual air of ownership he did with hers. He walked up behind Draco and wrapped his arms around the other man and kissed his neck with the same relaxed pleasure he did with her. She expected to feel jealously that this very new beau was just as affectionate with Draco as he was with her but instead watching them together just made her happy.

There was so little joy left in their world. To reject any opportunity for happiness seemed like finally giving up.

* * *

 **after**

He stopped her in the foyer and she made a show of rolling her eyes and playing the aggrieved housewife as he tugged her into a kiss. She pretended she wasn't cataloguing the ways he was still recovering, or checking for injuries as she ran a hand along his back, and he let her pretend. Things were still fragile. It was better not to push too much. Better not to probe too deeply.

* * *

 **during**

She hadn't given thought to the way they had been effectively celibate since she'd arrived. The cottage allowed almost no privacy and with her in the only room almost all the time they'd been left to steal moments in the toilet or when she made a point of going out and sitting in the garden with her back to the windows.

Once Blaise was kissing her, that changed as well.

She walked out of the bath, her hair still dripping down her neck and soaking into her borrowed shirt and found herself staring at Blaise, naked and sprawled across the one couch, Draco's head at work. She forced her eyes to move back up across Blaise's torso, along muscles she'd run her own hands along, up to his face. His skin was perfect. Unblemished. He remained free of all the scars she bore, all the scars Draco bore.

She resented that a little even as she appreciated his appearance.

He smirked at her and she immediately dropped her gaze to her own bare feet. "I'm sorry," she mumbled. "I'll go… recondition my hair or I could - "

"You could watch." Blaise drawled out the invitation with delight and she jerked her eyes back up in surprise only to discover that Draco had pulled his head away from Blaise and she was greeted by the site of… she flung her gaze back at Blaise's face, sure she was redder than she'd ever been and feeling grateful she wasn't as pale as Malfoy, whose skin betrayed every blush. Blaise was more visually impressive than her admittedly not extensive previous experiences had led her to expect from a man.

"I," she began then stopped. She had no idea how to respond to that invitation.

"Oh, Granger," Draco said, "I'd be insulted if you weren't at least a little interested.

"Please stay," Blaise said. "Surely a little cock sucking isn't anything new to you." His coaxing tone didn't even try to conceal how much he was enjoying how awkward she felt and she squirmed at his amusement.

"I just," she said and yet again fell silent. Usually, in her experience, she hadn't exactly had a view when this had been going on around her because it had been her mouth.

"If you're really uncomfortable, we can stop," Blaise offered but, after a brief, guilty hesitation, she shook her head.

She still didn't move until Draco asked, "Afraid?" in his mocking voice and that was how she ended up sitting in her chair, licking her lips and trying to act like this was ordinary and unexceptional. Watch two men? Oh, that's something I do every day. This isn't at all uncomfortable. When she looked at Blaise's face he lifted a hand to his mouth and blew her a kiss and that little gesture brought a smile to her face and eased some of the tension in her shoulders. By the time Blaise fisted those hands in Draco's hair and lost himself in the other man's touch her own mouth was open and her breathing shallower as she watched. Her heart pounded and tingles danced along her nerves that, for once, weren't part of her ongoing struggle with the aftermath of her ordeal but a reaction to the scene playing out in front of her.

* * *

 **later**

Hermione tossed the knife to Draco who caught it and said, "Do you have to be a walking menace?"

"Just chop the mistletoe berries and stop complaining," she advised, ignoring his exasperation. The man had been an athlete before he'd been a soldier. He knew how to catch things. "We're running low on Potions and you promised Blaise and me you'd help."

"Nag, nag, nag," Draco said as he chopped. "If I'd known rescuing you meant I'd endure twice the scolding, I might have reconsidered."

"Also twice the blow jobs," Hermione said as she grated the long-silenced mandrake root.

"You do make an excellent point," Draco said.

* * *

 **during**

"How did you like watching us?" Draco teased. Hermione could feel her face start to burn again and she twitched her hip away from his fingers in irritation. Draco laughed and ran his hand back along her side before settling it back at her waist. This time she let it rest there without real any real objection.

"You're a jerk," she said.

She could almost hear him grinning in the darkness. "You say that as if it's some sudden revelation, Granger. When have I not been a jerk?"

"Prat," she said, but she inched toward him in their bed, unsure of whether she'd be truly welcome. They didn't _cuddle_ , she and Malfoy. She sometimes cried on him, and he sometimes let his hands brush against her, but they didn't do anything as mutually vulnerable as _cuddle_. He seemed to freeze for a moment and then used the hand on his hip to pull her toward him and they shifted and settled until she had her head on his shoulder and her feet something akin to entwined with his.

"Not my fault you're a bit of a voyeur," he said once they'd turned to each other. His voice kept the same mocking lilt it often had but she could hear his heart racing.

"Well," she said. "Blaise is pretty."

"He is," Draco agreed.

She waited for him to say more, to _do_ more. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for the man to kiss her if he were so inclined and when he didn't, when he just agreed that their mutual love interest was attractive, she felt a lurch of disappointment. That turned to annoyance when he added, "He doesn't quite need as much looking after as you, either."

"I don't need looking after," she said. Her feet took that moment to twitch, one of the periodic muscle spasms that lingered, and Draco snorted. She kicked him for real in retaliation.

"So violent," he said. "Did the good guys know how violent you are?"

"They were aware," Hermione said, her irritation at his heavy-handed desire to smother her tempered by amusement at the idea that a participant in a war wouldn't be violent. They were all violent now.

He took a deep breath. "You know you'll probably never be well enough to… I wouldn't want to send you out into a battle," he said. "If you twitched at the wrong time and lost control of your wand, or the fight went on and your stamina - "

"I'm not broken," she whispered into the darkness.

"No," he agreed, his voice sad and soft and so gentle she wanted to cry. She could handle Draco Malfoy mean and teasing and pratty. When he became kind, though, it was too much. "You are fragile now, though. More fragile than you were. Just…" He stopped, took another breath, and then, when he spoke again he was back to being obnoxious and smug and the tears that had been threatening to choke her slid back away and left her in peace. "You're just a pain in the arse who wants to fight all the evil Death Eaters."

"Evil Death Eaters like you?" she asked, keeping her own voice light.

"No, the really evil ones," he said and for a moment the darkness was weighed on her again.

"So, you then," she said and Blaise made a kind of choking laugh from the other side of the bed and Draco groaned and tightened his hand on her and a grin pulled at her mouth.

"You're going to be the death of me," he said. "Go to sleep, brat."

She did. She lay and listened to Draco breathe and to the sound of his heart and then she fell and fell and fell into the quiet and the darkness and there was nothing.

When Hermione's breathing had become the soft, regular pattern of sleep, Draco untangled himself, rolled onto his back, and reached for Blaise. When the other man had laced his fingers through his, Draco said, "I don't know how to do this."

"Me either," Blaise said. The lay there as the moon rose and the cold light reached across the room until it shone on the pair of them.

Draco spread a hand across Blaise's abdomen and felt the taut muscles Hermione had admired earlier. He looked at the way his pale skin contrasted to the other man and said, "I guess I have a type."

"You mean people who will put up with your shite?" Blaise asked. At Draco's half-swallowed agreement, he added, "So that's all of the two of us."

"You were easier," Draco said.

Blaise took the pale hand and lifted it to his lips. "Not really," he said. "You were just as bad at starting things with me."

"What if she says no?" Draco asked. "She's next thing to trapped here. I don't want her to feel - "

"She won't say no," Blaise said.

"I'd do anything to keep her safe," he said. "She's the light, Blaise. Saving her is only thing I've done in years that wasn't about survival and I… she makes me more than… I'd change hell to keep that true, even a tiny bit."

"I know," Blaise said. "I know who you are."

* * *

 **before**

"We're never getting out," Draco said. He folded his face down into his hands. "You should take that portkey and go."

Blaise ran a hand along the back of Draco's neck. "It will be okay," he said. "Somehow it will all work out."

"Promise?" Draco asked, but the bleak tone didn't invite an answer.

* * *

 **during**

Draco never tried to so much as kiss her. He just watched her and Blaise with some of the same happiness she felt when she watched them but under that there was a wariness she couldn't slip past. Whenever she tried to breach the wall he slid away, off to work, off to do some chore he'd made up, off to kiss Blaise. Days passed and she kissed Blaise and waited for Draco to indicate he wanted more, which he never did. They were friends, she supposed. It was more than she would have ever expected.

 **before**

* * *

She lowered her wand and let out a slow breath as she looked at the body on the ground and waited for it to twitch or start to get up It didn't. Death had taken another one. "You okay?" Ron asked.

She shrugged. "I'm alive," she said.

He touched her shoulder and said, "The only really Unforgiveable thing would be letting those bastards, win. You know that, right?"

* * *

 **during**

"You're cheating," Hermione said in outrage as Draco scooped the cards up after winning another hand.

"Technically," he said, "I am exploiting a loophole in the rules."

"Cheating!" she said again and turned to Blaise for support.

Instead of backing her up, however, he just laughed and pulled her onto his lap and after nuzzling her he whispered in her ear, easily loudly enough for Draco to hear, "He's a Malfoy, Hermione. They cheat at breathing. If you expect any of them to play fair, you're a fool. If Draco tells you the sun rises in the east, double check."

She laughed in delight and grinned across the table at Draco, who grinned back. They'd been playing cards since dinner and as the sun had gone down and they'd lit the lanterns their spirits had become lighter and lighter. Draco had survived another month; he'd wrangled being sent back to Hogwarts to continue cataloguing the accumulated and badly organized debris of centuries. That no one was in pain or preparing to go out on a murder spree felt almost like happiness.

"Nothing but a cheater? You make me sound the villain," Draco mock complained as he began to deal the next hand. His teasing laugh was cut off when his eyes fell on the Mark burned into his arm. He froze for a moment before laying the first card out in front of Hermione. "Of course, I suppose that's what I am."

Hermione set her hand on top of his and pressed it to the table.

"I think interfering with the dealer is against the rules, Granger," he said.

"I don't think it's mentioned, actually," she said. "So I'm exploiting a loophole."

"We are, then, at a bit of an impasse," he said, "as I can't deal until you remove your hand."

"You aren't a villain," she said.

"Do you want to know how many people I've murdered?" he asked her. She opened her mouth but before she could speak he said, "Seven. I have pointed a wand at someone seven times and uttered an Unforgivable Curse and seen a beam of green light end a person's life. The boy who shook at Hogwarts, afraid to kill an old man who had actually wronged him, he's gone, Granger. I'm gone and what's here is - "

"Not a villain," she said. "Not to me."

He took a deep breath. "Maybe," he said. "But I think we've already established you're a fool." He yanked his hand out from under hers, the violence of that motion at odds with the deliberate way he put the deck of cards on the table and the careful way he stood up. "I'm tired," he said. "I think I'll go get ready for bed."

He was halfway across the small, single room when Hermione caught him. He stopped when she put her hand on his back. "Do you think I fought for so long and never killed anyone?" she asked. He shook beneath her touch and she went on as ruthlessly as she ever had. "It might not have been _avada kedavra_ , but they're just as dead. Tell me, Malfoy, am I a villain?"

He took a step away from her and she raised her voice. "I know you think I'm a fool and filthy and all the rest of it but tell me, Draco Malfoy, am I a villain? Because if you - "

"I think I'll take a shower," he said, still without turning.

"I will follow you," she said even more loudly and with that strain she could hear the rough burr in her voice emerge, the legacy of the damage she'd done to her throat screaming the night Draco Malfoy had brought her to his home. Draco visibly flinched at the sound. "I will follow you until you answer me. Am I a villain?"

"Hermione," Blaise began, but Draco had turned and she reached up the heel of her hand to wipe at the tear on his face.

"Because if you are," she said as he stood there. "I am."

Draco summoned a cocky smile that was perhaps a little bit tremulous but still managed to settle onto his face. "Would you really follow me into the shower, Granger?" he asked. "Doesn't seem quite your style."

When she nodded, her eyes glistening with her own unshed tears, he smirked, turned, and walked away with an affected, jaunty spring in his step. She gaped at his retreating back until the water began to run and he yelled out, "So about this wet discussion of my villainy? I'm waiting."

"I did warn you," Blaise said to Hermione as he began to pick up the cards. "But you keep assuming you can trust him to play fair." She looked at him, almost helplessly, until he added, "He also tends to hog the water, so don't be afraid to be pushy."

Gryffindor bravery won out over common sense and she found herself perched on the edge of the toilet as Malfoy acted liked showering in front of his house guest, or whatever it was she was, was a normal thing to do. She could see every last line of the man's body and she gave up even pretending she wasn't ogling him. Scars traced across his torso. He had as many, if not more, than she did, and the white lines seemed like the marks of an artist sketching out a history. That one was from school. That one from the time he'd come home, nearly fainting with blood loss, after Neville had attacked him. Others she didn't know.

He'd been slim in school, a wisp of an athlete. She'd known he'd filled out. Merlin, he'd dropped his trousers and waved his arse at her not long ago. Seeing the planes of his muscles as they rippled under the streams of water, however, was a different experience than helping him wash blood from a wound or even lying next to him in their bed. She wanted to splay her hands over the way his hips curved in toward… she yanked her eyes back to his face.

She was unsurprised to discover he was smirking at her.

"Getting in?" he asked.

"You are a presumptuous, overbearing - "

"Very cute."

" - arrogant, ridiculous bastard," she said. "But you are not a villain."

"You believe this why?" he asked her as he took a bar of soap and began lathering his torso and she thought that that really was rather unfair. How was she supposed to marshal her thoughts while he was doing that?

"Well, for one thing," she said, keeping her eyes above his waist. "No one's ever accused you of being one of the lower classes, even in the nearly feudal system the Malfoys seemed to still live within."

She tricked him into a laugh. "You are such an unbelievable, fucking swot," he said but the words sounded more admiring than anything else. "Fine, you win. I am not part of the lower social orders of the Middle Ages. Right." He pointed at the floor of the shower. "Now get in here."

"And you complain Blaise is bossy," she said, but even as she cursed herself for being so easy to manipulate, his sly comment that if she was afraid to get wet with the big bad Death Eater he'd understand had her shucking off her clothing and dropping them to the floor. The hot water made her jump a little and she almost slipped and Draco caught her. For the briefest of moments she saw his teasing, cocky facade drop and worry flash across his face before he edged back and ran a hand over her hip.

"You aren't as scrawny as you were," he said. "You didn't eat much on the run, did you?"

"Couldn't trust anyone," she said.

He ran a finger over the scar on her shoulder and she shivered. "You aren't a villain," he said. "Not you, Granger. Not ever you." He piled her hair on the top of her head, using several sticking charms to keep it tucked away and she laughed as he swore at yet another lock that sprang free. She didn't tell him the wandless magic impressed her but it did.

Draco Malfoy impressed her in a lot of ways and she didn't want to think too deeply about any of them.

Her hair somewhat mastered, he ran his hands down the length of her back and she gasped as they settled on her arse. "Blaise," she said, half in protest, half in worry.

Draco laughed and ran his fingers along her in a way that shocked her with the casual intimacy even as it made heat coil in her belly and moisture that had nothing to do with the shower appear between her legs. "You have the wrong one," Draco said. "Blaise is the dark one. I'm fair."

"Fair is what you aren't," she muttered.

"Mmm," was all he said to that as his fingers continued to explore and his mouth met hers. She lifted her hands, unsure and nervous because this couldn't be happening, and wrapped her arms around him and pulled him as close to her as she could manage as he thrust his tongue into her mouth and tasted her. To kiss Blaise was to melt into someone who combed out her hair and fetched her potions and teased and cared. She loved kissing Blaise. To kiss Draco was to be conquered.

She wasn't sure she cared for how much she liked that.

She pulled herself away from his mouth and his fingers and reached her own hand down. "Yes?" she asked him.

He opened his mouth and then closed it and leaned up against the wall. "I would never tell a lady no," he said. She watched his face as she slid her hand up and down the length of him. His smirk slowly faded as he closed his eyes and gave himself over to her touch and at last he came in her hands with a groan and she thought to herself she could own him as much as he could her.

"Are you two done yet?" Blaise asked from the door she'd left open. Hermione could feel guilt coil around her and start to squeeze until Blaise held out a towel for her. "You do have the best breasts," he said. "But, fuck, Draco. What did you do to her hair?"

Draco peeled an eye open and reached down to turn the water off. "It wanted to kill me," he said. "Her hair is a menace."

"You're a menace," Hermione muttered as she wrapped the towel around herself against the cold air.

"Yes," Blaise agreed. He took her hand and kissed it, his eyes on Draco. "But he's our menace."

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - If you are enjoying this, please let me know…**


	10. Chapter 10

**during**

The week after their encounter in the shower felt like a honeymoon. She'd wake to find Draco's head between her legs and Blaise smirking at her, propped up on one elbow. She'd spend the days in the tiny area around the cottage included in the Fidelius Charm letting the sun soak into her skin. She didn't have to worry about Draco coming back covered in blood because he spent his days sorting Hogwarts into neatly labeled boxes for the monster who owned him.

She didn't have to worry about him coming back with blood on his hands, either.

They'd spend the nights folding into one another, bodies joining and parting in ways she'd never dreamt possible. What she didn't do was look too closely at what she was doing because she could not care about Draco Malfoy and he certainly would not care about her. He and Blaise were connected in ways she'd never share. Both purebloods. Both Slytherin. They understood one another. They loved one another. She was… she was a lover, she supposed. She was a woman who shared their bed.

She told herself, even as she fell asleep with her hand over Draco's heart, not to look for more than this. It was enough to enjoy this before it was time to leave.

And always there, the thing that could never be forgotten, was his Mark. Don't let yourself care for him, she'd think. Don't let yourself care for either of them. Sooner or later Draco will come home with Ginny Weasley's death as his most recent kill and Blaise will pour him a drink and they'll go on, your friend murdered. If not her, someone else. Someone good. Someone on your side. He didn't have a choice. She understood that. It meant that when the time came he'd do what he had to do in order to survive another day.

To care about them as more than lovers, as more than a stop on the path, was asking for heartbreak.

To love them might as well be suicide.

So she would be sensible and she would not.

She would just enjoy the honeymoon while it lasted.

* * *

 **later**

She would just sob for hours while Blaise watched her, helpless. Something in her had broken and he didn't know how to fix it. Then, one day, she seemed better. She smiled again. She ate again. He didn't know what had caused the change but he thanked Merlin for happier days and didn't ask questions.

* * *

 **during**

"I've been told I can't just stay up at Hogwarts," Draco said one night over dinner.

Blaise's hand stilled and then he continued passing the wine bottle to Hermione. "Oh?" he said.

"Yes. Apparently I've done enough penance for the incompetencies of my parents and can look forward to chances in the future to demonstrate my own skills and loyalties."

The food turned to dust in Hermione's mouth.

"Well," Blaise said. "Try not to get cursed." He glanced at Hermione. "Try not to curse anyone either."

* * *

 **later**

They were still there when he got back. If Hermione hadn't changed, hadn't wrapped herself in the grey jumper she wore when she wanted him close, he would have thought they hadn't moved. Blaise leaned up against the headboard, his arms wrapped around the woman who lay half asleep with her face against his chest. Draco shut the door as quietly as he could, hoping not to wake her, but her eyes opened at the sound and she turned to study him with her large, dark eyes.

"I'm fine," he said. He pulled the mask off and dropped it onto the table, shucked off the robe and tossed it onto the back of chair. "I didn't see anyone you knew," he added and at that she relaxed. Another night in the war with no personal loss to mourn.

Draco sat on the edge of the bed and let her lay a hand along his cheek, a balm he never felt he deserved from anyone, much less Hermione Granger, and yet one she gave unstintingly every time. He sometimes thought if he came back and said he'd cursed Ron Weasley and left the man dead she'd still lay that palm along his face. He turned so he could press a kiss into it.

"Who was it?" Blaise asked. "How bad was it?"

"Bad," Draco admitted. "Bad enough."

The pair of them made room for him and he pulled himself between them. "There were a group of werewolves and Snatchers that were unhappy with their place within the organization," he said. "They got mouthy about it."

Blaise sucked in his breath. That had been unwise.

"Just so," Draco said. "We rounded them up and an example was made in front of the rest of the Snatchers." He took a deep breath. "You know the kind of examples the Dark Lord likes. I don't think… I don't think there will be any more dissension in the ranks."

He'd thought he'd recognized one of the Snatchers and that had made it personal for him and his curses had had enough extra power behind them as a result that he'd been cooed over by his mad aunt.

Hermione swallowed hard but it was Blaise who first grabbed at Draco and pressed his mouth to the other man's. With a groan Draco clutched at his partner and their kiss became frenzied, almost violent, as Hermione began to pull off her jumper. "No!" Draco said, yanking himself away from Blaise to stop her.

She froze and he said, "I love seeing you in that. I love knowing you wear it, that you want me around you even when I'm… I want to fuck you in that jumper tonight, Hermione, please."

She just shimmied out of the pajama bottoms she'd had on and left the jumper as a response and Draco's mien began the slow transfiguration she and Blaise wrought after every one of his assignments. Blaise yanked down Draco's trousers and fetched lubricant as Hermione pulled off the man's pants and took him in her mouth. They shifted and settled until Draco knelt over her, stripped and bare, and she used the talents he found himself newly in awe of every time to pull him from himself until all he cared about was her tongue, all he knew was her mouth. Blaise waited, his fingers working the lubricant in and around him, until he'd gasped and pulled himself away from her, not ready to be done. Hermione slid up so he could lower himself and thrust his tongue into her mouth even as Blaise slid into him.

It was, as it always was on these nights he came back, frenzied. There were afternoons they explored one another's bodies, long hours of finding every nook and cranny with hands and tongues. That was how he'd discovered running his fingers along the inside of Hermione's arms made her gasp. That was how she'd found a spot at the base of his neck that drove him wild. He loved those long hours of lazy, glorious sex.

He needed this, though. He needed the way they just fucked him when he got back from being a Death Eater.

Blaise gripped at him as he moaned and pressed his own forehead to Hermione's, focused on nothing but sensation. She deliberately scratched his back hard enough he knew he'd need to heal it later but he just let out a gasp and tightened his own hold on her. Blaise was getting rougher and almost brutal as he neared his own climax and Draco could hear the man say his name over and over again until he dug his fingers into his hips and there was a brief pause until Blaise said, "You plan to just lie there or are you going to fuck her?"

"Get off me, arsehole," Draco said and Blaise laughed and rolled to the side even as Draco thrust into Hermione as hard as he could. She arched her hips up to meet him and he pounded into her, each stroke helping him forget, forget, forget as he felt the softness of his own jumper between them, the jumper she wore because she was his, the jumper she wore because she wanted him, filthy, disgusting him as close to her as she could manage whenever he was gone. "Hermione," he said as she wrapped her legs so he heels dug into his arse and met him violent thrust for violent thrust until he came into her, the closest thing he knew to salvation.

He reached down and ran his thumb over her in a circular motion. The touch wasn't gentle or teasing or romantic or anything he would ever think she'd want, but she fell apart under his hand in almost record time. "I need you," she whispered in his ear as he lowered his head so it lay next to hers. "I can't bear the thought of you getting hurt on these… or that you might… promise me you'll always come back, Draco. Promise me."

Blaise arm hooked around him as he smoothed and smoothed the cashmere of his jumper over her breasts. "I need you too," he said. "I'd do anything for you, Hermione. Anything."

* * *

 **during**

Blaise lay out the cards and they sat at the table and played 'war'. The game had lasted through two pots of tea and first she'd had almost all the cards, then he'd rallied and taken most of them back. Now she was winning again and, if she'd counted correctly, she had all the aces and two of the kings.

Draco was still out.

Whenever they heard a twig snap outside they both turned to the door, waiting for the handle to turn and the silver mask to get tossed down onto a shelf. So far, nothing. So far, the woods around the cottage seemed to be very loud.

"I'm sure he's fine," Hermione said as she lay down a two and sighed as Blaise captured it with a three. "Just a late night."

Blaise nodded. "Probably had one of those awful meetings after," he said. "Cognac and toasting to the great future that will belong to them once those pesky rebels are squashed once and for all."

"Nothing to worry about," Hermione said.

Blaise slid his bare foot under the table so it nudged against hers. "Hey," he said. "He always comes back."

She set her cards down and stood up. "I know," she said. "It's just… it's so late this time." She crossed over to the window and tried to peer out into the darkness. All she saw was her own worried face reflected back at her and Blaise, rising behind her and joining her. He wrapped an arm around her chest and pulled her against him and she let her head fall back against his shoulder.

"It will be fine," he said.

"You can't know," she said.

He turned her so she had to look up at his actual face instead of the shadowy reflection and said, "Hermione, it will be fine. They can't afford to just kill off their own people and he's very good at staying alive when he's in the field. If he died, it would be because he didn't have anything left to live for, not because one of your friends got in a lucky curse."

She looked up into his dark, slanted eyes and searched for a lie. She couldn't find one. Worry, yes, but not anything extreme. He pressed his lips to her forehead. "Trust me, Hermione."

"I do," she said unhappily. "It's just - "

He stopped her mouth with a kiss. "It's just nothing," he said, his breath hot and sweet on her skin. "I'm tired of cards."

She was too. They'd failed to distract her from counting the minutes for some time and when Blaise ran his hands along the inside of her shirt, the touch of his skin made her own burn. His mouth wandered from her lips to her throat to her shoulders, and, by the time he had her shirt tugged over her head, she'd started unbuttoning his as well. He had to laugh when she tried to tug it off and the fastened cuffs stopped her. "Who buttons their shirts like that at home?" she said in frustration as he snickered at her and paused to undo them.

"People with standards?" he suggested. She would have told him to bugger off with his snide remark but he'd started nuzzling at one breast while he cupped the other and ran his thumb over the erect nipple and she lost her train of thought.

"The bed," she said. She already knew, from unfortunate experience, that the texture of the rug on the floor left abrasions.

"The bed," he agreed, and picked her up and carried her there even as she insisted she could walk because she wasn't a cripple. "I know," he said after he laid he down and began to pull down his trousers. "I was just planning on making you use your strength for things other than walking." She reached a hand out toward him and admired the way his muscles shifted as he kicked aside first trousers and then pants. She had her own clothes off by the time he settled next to her, lean, toned and very much interested in things other than their card game.

Hermione had the brief thought, as she licked her lips and admired him, that anyone who cared about card games that much wasn't anyone she wanted to know well. Then his fingers were trailing up the inside of one thigh and she didn't have many thoughts other than how she wanted him to keep doing _that_.

That was how Draco found them, her legs sprawled and Blaise lowering himself into her after pulling not one but two orgasm from her, one with his fingers and the second with a mouth he'd not bothered to wipe clean before kissing her so deeply she'd been barely able to breathe. She couldn't speak, couldn't think, just clung to him as the door opened and Draco walked in.

The mask hit the couch with a thunk and she turned her head to see him, black robes already half off. "Don't stop," he said. "This is the nicest thing I've seen all day." He'd crossed the small room and cupped his hand behind her head and thrust his tongue into her open mouth even as Blaise slid more and more deeply into her. "I missed you," he whispered into her ear when he finally let her go. "So much."

"I missed you too," she said, then gasped as Blaise wrenched her attention back to him. Both of them laughed and she gasped again at the angle of Blaise's thrust even as a smile tugged at her heart at the way Draco reached out to run a hand along Blaise's arm, at the way Blaise paused long enough to smile at his partner.

Draco got the rest of his clothes off while Blaise finished, and then began again.


	11. Chapter 11

**during**

Draco fell forward through the door of their cottage and collapsed. The dark robes usually hid blood but today the fabric hung as though it had been soaked and red began to seep out from the man's body and tip toe across the floor.

"Shite." Blaise pulled himself away from Hermione. They'd sat, as they always did, waiting for Draco to return and hoping that this would be one of the times where nothing of note had happened. Most of the time he came back from Death Eater missions grim and sad but unharmed. "I saw that Weasley girl," he might say. "Or someone else with an equally unfortunate head of ginger hair. She was fine, though if I had hair that colour I might just fall on my sword and be done with it."

This did not appear to be one of those good nights. This was the horror. This was what they feared.

Blaise began gathering potions from the stockpile they kept on hand as Hermione hurried to pull the mask off Draco and toss it to the side. He began to cough and she watched in horror as he spit up even more blood, first a little and then a lot.

"Sorry," he said as he picked his head up and looked at her with grey eyes lost in a face where she could already see bruises appearing. "Failed to please."

"Don't talk," Hermione ordered as she began running through all the healing charms she knew. She stretched him out on the floor and began casting; pain control, internal bleeding and bruising assessments and repair, staunching blood loss. She remembered when magic had been floating a feather. "Miss Granger's got it!" professors would exclaim and she'd beam at them with innocent pleasure. Somewhere along the way magic had become about hurting people, and then about patching people up who had been hurt. She'd staved off death's whisper more often than she cared to recall while on the run with Harry and Ron. She'd become first a good field medic, and then a better one, and now she could probably hold her own with any trauma Healer at St. Mungo's. She used those skills now as she eased pain away, stitched broken bones back together, knit up the sleeve of what had been his skin. "Miss Granger's got you," she said under her breath as she worked. "Stay with me, Malfoy."

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. He tried to smirk but failed. "Leave the bosom of your care when I've not had enough time to - ." He coughed again and more blood came up. "Need to spend more time with that bosom, you know."

"Damn it, Draco," Blaise said as he tipped a potion down the man's throat. "What did you do?"

"Didn't please," Draco said. He closed his eyes and shuddered at the memories. "Have to please the Dark Lord, you know."

"But what did you do?" Blaise demanded again. "It's never been this bad!"

"Let Potter get away."

Hermione's hands froze mid-incantation and she had to start again.

"Saw him," Draco said. "Fucker with his messy hair and stupid glasses and could have got him but I stepped on a twig and he saw me and apparated away." Draco shuddered. "Bastard got off a nasty curse before he disappeared but I blocked it. Got Amycus' attention though."

"You warned him," Blaise said. The words were flat and without any hint of approval or disapproval. "And Amycus Carrow saw. You fucking idiot. How are you alive?"

"That's not what the Dark Lord saw," Draco said. He reached a hand out to Hermione and, with a choked sob, she took it. She knew he was already better. Magic had already healed most of the damage his cohorts had wrought as punishment, but the pain, spells and potions aside, had to still be tremendous. She wasn't sure how he'd made it home; he should be dying where they'd left him. "Dark Lord saw that I hated Potter, so many years of hatred. That I wanted to lay him at the man's feet to redeem my family, that I wanted to die because I'd failed."

He coughed again. "Occlumency, you know."

"Letting me live with my failure was supposed to be more agony."

Hermione brought Draco Malfoy's hand to her cheek and then brushed her lips across the tips of his fingers. "Thank you," she said. She tried to control the tears and then the rage and she failed at first one and then the second. "I'll kill him," she said as her cheeks got wetter and wetter. "All of them. I will kill them. How dare they do this to you because you made a mistake? They think you are one of them - "

"I am," Draco said.

"Liar," she said. "You aren't, you aren't, you aren't, you aren't." She broke down and collapsed onto him, repeating the words like a prayer to an uncaring god. Draco Malfoy had let Harry go. He had warned the man the Death Eaters were there so he could get away, and then he'd taken this beating - this torture - as punishment for what his monstrous colleagues thought was a mistake. "If they knew - " she began.

"I'd be dead," Draco said. He lifted a blood-smeared hand to rest it on the back of her head. "Well, probably not yet," he admitted. "But I'd wish I were." He twined a finger around one curl. "Don't be mad."

"You're an idiot," Blaise said again. This time he sounded resigned. "Do you think you can stop wailing over his body like some tart in a Greek play, Hermione, and help me get him cleaned up and into bed?"

It took the pair of them and a battalion of cleaning and freshening charms, but they finally wrangled the nearly unconscious Draco out of his blood-soaked clothing and into bed. Hermione lay next to him, her hand resting on his chest as if she could will it to continue rising and falling by her touch alone. She traced her eyes along the sharp angles of his face, too harsh for what would normally be called handsome, and, despite all the magic they'd expended on him, still purple and swollen in spots. "You fool," she whispered, but she didn't mean it.

"He is," Blaise said. He lay down on the other side of the body, his own hands running along the man's back, searching still for wounds they'd missed. "Go to sleep, Hermione. I'll watch him."

She did, her hand falling from Draco's chest to lie unmoving and passive next to him. When the exhaustion brought on by the hours of tense worry while Draco had been out followed by the frantic need to heal his injuries waned and she stirred back into wakefulness, Draco's eyes were open.

"You're alive," she said.

"Technically," he said, "yes."

She began to cry again, great sobs that shook her body and threatened to choke her. "When you fell," she said, "I was so afraid."

"Shh," Draco said, reaching a hand out to touch her face. "Granger, you'll wake Blaise, and you know what he's like without enough sleep."

That made her laugh and hiccough a little and she sniffled and pulled herself until her face was pressed into Draco Malfoy's pale and scarred torso. "I thought you would die," she said. The words were so simple and had so much behind them. I don't want you to die was the simplest. I have become used to you was the next step up that ladder. I like to drink tea with you and play cards with you. I don't want to be without you.

She didn't let herself think too much further. There were some rungs better left unclimbed.

"I didn't," he said and he wrapped his arms around her and held her in the darkness of their bed, Blaise beside them. "I won't," he said.

"You can't promise that," she said. "You can't know."

He tightened his grip on her and said nothing for a long while. Finally he said, "I can promise I'll do whatever it takes to come back to you alive when it's all over. Will that suffice?"

She supposed it would have to.

"Why?" she asked him. It was the question she needed to know, the thing she needed to understand. "Why would you warn Harry?"

Draco took a deep breath. "Because he's the chance," he said. She could almost hear him searching for words to explain why he'd done what he'd done and chosen brutal abuse over a hero's rewards. What laurels would have been heaped on his head for bringing Voldemort the only thing he feared! He would have redeemed his family's failures, earned boon after boon, and he'd thrown that all away to protect a man she knew he personally resented at the very least and probably hated.

"I'm trapped," Draco said. "This thing on my arm, I can't run, can't escape. I can barely keep my soul alive." His heart was beating very fast, she thought, a frantic bird trapped in the cage of his ribs. "Potter is supposed to be the only one who can kill him, and until he's dead I'm a puppet."

"Not a very good one," she said. She could feel him tense beside her and she teased as gently as she could, "Rescuing Mudbloods, warning Harry. For a puppet you're pretty - "

"It's not enough," Draco said. She tipped her face up to look at him and he cupped a hand behind her head. "Nothing could ever be enough." He pressed his mouth to hers and she opened her lips under the achingly gentle contact. She wasn't sure what he sought. Absolution, maybe, or perhaps just comfort. She felt his tongue against hers and melted into him as the kiss became more and more demanding until she was clinging to him as he bit at her lips and his fingers dug into her. She made a tiny whimper as his clutching hands began to actually hurt her and he immediately wrenched himself away, gasping.

"I'm so sorry," he said. He smoothed his hands over the place his fingers had been and then ran a thumb over her lips. "I… of all the things I've had to do as a Death Eater, that's a line I've never crossed. I… I never want to force you, or hurt you, or - "

She put her mouth back against his and kissed the words away for a moment before she murmured, "My wandless, voiceless magic isn't spectacular, but I think I could manage to knee you in the stones if you were out of line."

"Good to know," Draco said.

She returned to lying with her cheek pressed against his bare chest. They'd had a hard enough time getting him stripped and cleaned. Redressing him in pajamas had been out of the question. "Why not just be a good little Death Eater?" she asked him. "I'm sure you'd be brilliant at it. Climb the ranks, be evil, win evil badges, or something."

He didn't answer for such a long time she thought he'd fallen back into the healing well of sleep but then he said, just as her own eyes were trying to stay closed, "He murdered my mother."

That woke her up.

"It was quick," he said. "That was a mercy, I suppose. He thought she'd failed when she announced Potter was dead, but he just thought it was one more way Potter seems to cheat death at every turn, not an actual betrayal on her part."

Hermione swallowed hard. Harry had told her that he'd escaped yet another death thanks to Malfoy's mother lying for him. The woman had cared more about her son's life than she had about any ideology and, as Harry lay on the ground, theoretically slain by Voldemort, outside the castle before the Battle of Hogwarts, Narcissa Malfoy had checked his breathing, asked about Draco, and then falsely confirmed his death.

Hermione hadn't stopped to think what the consequences to Narcissa Malfoy would have been. Voldemort, who'd neither won nor lost the Battle of Hogwarts, but merely started a war that still burned in fits and starts, had probably not been pleased when his nemesis had jumped up and started cursing him. He'd certainly retreated quickly enough.

"It was, though," Hermione said. "A betrayal, I mean."

"It was," Draco agreed.

"And your father," she asked.

She could feel Draco resting his cheek against her hair, could feel his breath as it shuddered out before he said, "He was unable to endure."

"I'm sorry," she said, but what she really felt wasn't sorrow at the loss of the Malfoy patriarch anger. Damn Lucius Malfoy for deciding he was unable to go on when faced with his wife's murder. Damn him for leaving his son to face the monsters alone. Damn him.

"I miss him so much," Draco said, his voice muffled in her hair. "Sometimes I wish I could talk to him the way I did when I was a kid and ask him what he thinks I should do."

"Defect," she said, her voice tiny. She said it again, a little more loudly. "You should defect."

Draco let out a low, bitter laugh. "Granger," he said, "maybe you're forgetting this, but they almost killed me today for making a mistake."

"It wasn't a mistake," she insisted, knowing she was being mulish and unreasonable but unable to stop herself. "You did a good thing, you did a - "

"And I almost died as a result," he said.

She huddled against him because it was true. "They can't hold your parents over you anymore," she said, trying to encourage him.

"No," Draco agreed. "Only Blaise." She must have stirred at that because he kissed the top of her head. "Little fool," he said, the tone more affectionate than the words. "Try to remember everyone assumes you're dead. If anyone knew you were here…" He didn't finish the thought, just held on to her more tightly.

"My parents are gone too," she said into the silence of what her life would do to both men if it were discovered. Draco asked how her parents had gone and she told him, her cheeks getting wet again at the story unfurled, how she'd erased herself from her parents' lives and sent them to another country so they'd be safe. "I think of them, sometimes," she whispered. "The happy, childless couple. I wonder if they have a problem with aggressive kangaroos in their yard or if they decided to have a baby. "It would be their first," she said, her voice catching on the words as she remembered how proud of her they'd been, how fascinated by everything magical.

"Didn't want them to be endangered because of you?" Draco asked her. She didn't answer him because her reasoning was obvious and at last he said, "If it's any consolation, I would have done the same thing."

"I feel cruel," she said. "I worry if they knew they'd hate me."

"Not if they were smart," he said. "If they were smart they'd be damn grateful."

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - I await your reactions to this one with my heart in my throat._**


	12. Chapter 12

**during**

Hermione had been muttering an incantation and waving her wand out in the small yard for at least an hour when Blaise finally broke down and stepped outside and asked her what she was doing.

"Trying to summon a Patronus," she muttered.

He had to stop and think about what that was. The charm was well beyond the scope of the school curriculum and he'd never paid much mind to the random antics of her mates. When he recalled what it was he shrugged. He'd tried it once, gotten nowhere, and moved back to reading Quidditch magazines. He hadn't been one for spending hours mastering extra work as a boy. That would have been a bit too much like caring.

All he said now, as she said the charm again, waved her wand, and produced nothing but a puff of white smoke, was, "I thought you could do all the magic."

She glared at him. "I could," she said. She tried again and, again, nothing impressive. "This wand," she said, and shook it as though she could lay the blame for her failure with it.

Blaise pulled out his. "Try it with mine?" he suggested.

She took the stick of wood gingerly. A person's wand was like an extension of their soul, and sharing them just wasn't done. It was weird to pass a wand over. It was disconcerting. He crossed his arms and watched her. "You had my cock in your mouth not an hour ago," he pointed out as she hesitated. "I think if we can share that, we can share this."

"It's different," she said.

He shrugged. She was right, of course, but he was curious what would happen. She said the charm and this time there wasn't even the white smoke. "What are you trying to do?" he asked her.

"I've always had trouble with this one," she said. She handed him his wand back, pulled her own replacement one back out and tried again. "It was so easy for Harry and Ron. Even Ginny could do this with no trouble but I could just never get the feel of it."

Another failure and he tried again. "So why work on it now?"

"I want to send a message to Harry and Ron," she said.

He froze. "What?" he asked. He struggled to keep the words as quiet and non-accusatory as possible. He tried not to sound defensive and furious and upset. "Why would you do that?"

* * *

 **later**

"It's a bad idea," Blaise snapped at him. "It's cruel."

Draco just looked at the other man until he swore and flung the cup he'd been holding at the wall where it shattered. "Fine," he snarled. "I'll help you, you bastard."

Hermione stuck her head out the bathroom door. "Everything okay?" she asked.

"It's fine," Draco said. "Finish your shower, water hogger."

* * *

 **during**

"It's a bad idea," Blaise said. His eyes never left Draco even though he was arguing with Hermione. "They'll just try to track you down and rescue you and, last time I checked, you were pretty happy here."

Hermione made a frustrated sound. It was all she could do to keep from stomping her foot like a child. "I am happy with you," she said. "This is… stop that!"

Draco looked up from where he sat at her feet. He'd pulled one sock off and was beginning to slowly rub her foot. "I thought all women liked foot massage," he said.

"You're trying to distract me," she said, yanking her foot out of his hands. "And it's not going to work."

"Is that a dare?" Draco asked her in evident delight. "Please tell me that's a dare, Hermione."

"You should be in bed," she said. "You are barely recovered. You were really hurt and… Draco!"

He was laughing so hard he'd folded over on himself. "I should be in bed," he said. "The ways in which you are not at all astute never fail to delight. It's as if your brain said, 'What's the most pathetic double entendre I could come up with?' and then slides it out your mouth without so much as a by-your-leave."

"I want to be in her mouth," Blaise said. "Sliding in, if possible."

"You two are impossible," she said but she knew they'd won this round because her lips were tweaking up in a smile she couldn't control. It had been a rough week. Draco had been summoned in every other day to report on his recovery to some Death Eater flunky who continued to report he wasn't fit with what seemed to Hermione like malice. Draco had confirmed her guess that the corrupt Healer loved how much he had been injured and enjoyed seeing how long his recovery was taking.

"Still," Draco had said, "the longer the worthless hag keeps me from active duty, the longer I can spend with the pair of you." He'd refused potions from that moment, insisting that now that he wasn't in any real danger, he'd get well the slow way. "Once I'm cleared for field duty you can go back to dosing me, Hermione. Until then, I plan to be a man of leisure and lie about and let you wait on me."

She felt guilty for how much she'd enjoyed that time. He was still in pain she'd tell herself in disgust when she realized how happy being around him made her. He hid it and tried not to hobble or limp as he moved his way from the bed to the couch to a chair outdoors in the sun but she knew he flinched when he thought she wasn't looking. They talked and she learned the man who'd grown from the boy she'd despised and understood how he'd become the person who stepped on a stick to warn his childhood nemesis that danger approached. He'd been trapped and beaten and seen almost everyone he loved die. All he had left was hope that maybe, just maybe, Harry Potter would triumph and he could slink off to exile with Blaise, a disgraced and despised villain.

"What do you want?" she'd asked him.

He'd closed his eyes and said, "A cottage like this one somewhere. You and Blaise. Not being sent out to kill. Maybe a cat."

"I think we can do a cat," she'd said, ignoring the way her heart pounded at the simple future and how appealing it sounded. "Maybe a two room cottage, though? I'd kind of like to not see the kitchen from the bed."

"You are so profligate with Blaise's money," Draco had said. She'd thought at first he was being serious and she'd shrunk back into herself, worried she'd presumed too much until Blaise had rolled his eyes and pulled her back onto his lap.

"Draco, you can be such an arsehole," he'd said.

It was just hard to believe she'd been integrated into their relationship so smoothly. She kept waiting for an argument, for a hitch, for this to be not as easy as it seemed.

"If you were to defect," she began, but Draco had stood up and was divesting himself of shirt and trousers and any discussion of summoning Ron and Harry, of Draco Malfoy's defection to the side of the light, was postponed.

* * *

 **later**

Harry almost choked when he got the patronus. The message didn't seem believable, but if anyone could have done such a thing, found him such a tool, it would have been Hermione.

"She always had a thing for the downtrodden," Ron said when Harry cornered him and demanded to know his opinion on what seemed impossible, too miraculous to be true. "Maybe it's real."

* * *

 **during**

Hermione realized she'd never been alone in the cottage the day both Blaise and Draco had to go together to a mandatory social event of some sort hosted by one of the Carrow twins. She didn't ask what the entertainment would be. She suspected it would be something horrific.

It surprised her that the Death Eaters were so accepting of the men as a couple. She'd have expected more prejudice from a group that seemed to seek out reasons to hate. When Draco muttered that it wasn't as if the Carrow twins were in any position to judge it took her a moment to understand what he meant and then she wanted to be ill.

"Family reunions are perfectly good places to pick up girls," Blaise said. By the look on his face he found the idea as repellant as she did. "Just so long as your family's pureblood."

Hermione supposed she shouldn't be surprised. She'd suspected as much about the Gaunts when Harry told her about Voldemort's family history. It was still disgusting to have it made clear that these people considered incest less troubling than mixing with people who had what they thought of as inferior blood status.

"Have fun," she said.

"Unlikely," Draco said, still muttering as he fussed with his robes and grabbed his mask.

Blaise stopped at the door, lay his hand along Hermione's cheek, and studied her with a searching expression until she gave him a shove and told him to go along. He kissed her lightly at that and said, "Don't miss me too much."

"As if I would," she scoffed and the door closed behind them and she was alone. The late afternoon sun slid in through one of the cottage's windows and lay along the wooden floor like a lazy cat and Hermione made herself a cup of tea and picked up a book of spells she'd been meaning to review and sat in a chair.

It was very quiet.

The faucet dripped where she hadn't shut it all the way off and she could hear her own breathing and she pulled her feet up under her and tried to read. The light crept along the boards and the faucet dripped and she pulled her feet under her and tried to make her eyes and mind focus on the words instead of how quiet it was.

What if they didn't come back?

She knew the cottage was under a fidelius charm but those could be broken if you had access to... Draco and Blaise were both careful, but so had she and Ron and Harry been careful, and they'd still lost their safe haven. She tried to banish those thoughts and got up and forced the dripping faucet into compliance. She wiped the counter and wiped it again and told herself Draco was an excellent occlumens. He'd been around endless Death Eaters since he'd rescued her and no one had ever discovered he had her tucked away. But what about Blaise? She shivered and put her hand to her hip, making sure her wand was still in easy reach.

Any other witch and they'd face nothing more than amusement they had a playmate tucked away. Any other Muggle-born and they'd just be teased they liked it a little dirty. But not her. She was Harry Potter's best friend and, moreover, she was supposed to be dead. She was a death sentence to anyone found sheltering her.

Darkness had chased away the last sunbeam and she closed up the book she'd made no headway in and put it back onto its shelf. She paced and thought and planned and finally ended up sitting on the bed, shoes on, with her back pressed against the wall. She held her wand in her hand, pointed at the door, and waited.

That was how Blaise found her.

He opened the door, charmed the lamps into flame, and turned to see her wand shaking as she held it. It only took him a moment to assess the situation and he made a show of moving very slowly to set his own wand down and hold his hand out before him. "It's just me," he said. Her eyes flickered from him to the door behind him and he added, "There's no one else."

"Draco - "

"Was cordially invited to stay for a private Death Eater only meeting." Blaise took a step toward the bed. "It wasn't the kind of invitation one can refuse."

"Is he..." She trailed off, afraid to ask.

"He's fine," Blaise said. "A bit irritated that Yaxley kept needling him about his parents' failures, but he's fine." He took another step toward her. "Hermione, please put your wand away."

She blinked a few times and looked down at the tool and weapon still leveled at him and, with a choked sob, dropped it to the coverlet. Blaise had her in his arms immediately. She shook and let him hold on to her for just a few breaths before she said, the words partially muffled against his chest, "I feel so stupid."

"Not all scars are visible," he said and that was when she started to sob. She burrowed her face into his shirt and just let herself cry out the fears she'd sat with since they'd left. At last he wiped her face and asked, "What were you planning to do if someone... if someone other than Draco or I had walked through that door?"

The teasing light that had come into his eyes disappeared when she said, simply, "Kill them."

He tightened his grip on her at that.

"Kill them," she repeated, "and then find you and Draco, wherever you were, and - "

He let her go and looked at her with horror on his face. The stubborn set to her jaw made his narrow his eyes and he said, "That would be suicide. If that happened, there'd be so many... Hermione, you have to promise me you wouldn't do that."

She didn't say anything and he clenched his own jaw, a near mirror of her expression, and got up and backed across the room to the window. He turned away from her and looked out into the night as if he'd find support there against the what he considered her idiotic idea.

"Looking after boys is what I do," she offered. "I have since - "

"I am not Potter," he said. The words were low and angry and she flinched away from them. "I am not some idiot boy who needs you to... I am a man and have been surviving without your help for quite some time now." He turned and stood there, a dark wraith in the flickering light of the lanterns. "I don't want you flinging yourself into the arms of some Snatcher to -"

"They were too close," she whispered. Blaise looked as if she'd slapped him and she realized she'd just confirmed what had only been a guess. "They were too close," she said again, talking rapidly now as if that could make him understand. "Harry - Ron, too - they needed time to get away and I - "

"You are not a sacrificial lamb." He took a step back toward where she sat on the bed and Hermione flattened herself against the wall. In all the time she'd lived with him she'd never heard him sound so angry. Blaise could be smug, arrogant, cold, often amused. She'd never seen him in a rage before. "You are not a pawn, and you don't get to - "

"I can't do it any more without you."

The words hung there and stopped Blaise.

"It's my life and if I want to risk it - "

"It wouldn't be a risk," he said still furious as he took another step back to her. "It would be suicide. You can't go after either of us if we're alive and in..." He took a deep breath and said, "Promise me you won't."

One fat tear after another spilled down her cheeks but she shook her head again until he sat back down and he whispered, "But I love you. You can't die."

She flung herself into his arms at that and they sat there on the bed, frustrated and angry and scared and not letting go until Draco finally came home. Hermione missed the quick look the two men exchanged but Draco dropped his wand on the table with a loud clatter and said, "Shoes on the bed, Granger? I thought you were more civilized than that."


	13. Chapter 13

**during**

Draco shoved the bowl back. He'd been unusually silent over dinner, unusually unhappy. When either of them had asked him what the matter was he'd brushed them off until, having been asked one time too many, he snapped. "The matter," he said, banging his spoon down on the napkin he'd already folded with sharp, angry movements, "is that I am a Death Eater. The _matter_ is that I alternate my days finding new ways for a madman to use magic to hurt people and groveling at his feet hoping he doesn't hurt me. The _matter_ is that there's no way out."

"When Harry," Hermione began.

"Oh, yes," Draco said. "When Harry does whatever obscure, magical thing he's supposed to do to kill an immortal madman who's already come back from the dead once, we'll all be free, and you'll get a pet unicorn, and songbirds will greet us every day in harmony, and… and… and this fucking soup will taste good."

Blaise set his own spoon down with far more care than Draco had. "I didn't realize you didn't like pea soup," he said. He kept his voice carefully neutral though Hermione had watched him squint at a cookbook over this particular dish for much of the afternoon. "I'll stop making it."

Draco, however, knew Blaise well enough to see through the neutrality and he rubbed his face with his hands. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm an arse. The soup is fine, it's just... There's nothing. No way out. We all know Potter doesn't even have a plan, he's just - "

He broke off what he was saying and looked at Hermione. She'd turned a dull red as he spoke and had become very interested in her own dinner. "Fucking Gryffindors," Draco breathed out. "You lot can't hide secrets to save your lives."

"I did," she said. Draco waved that aside. She'd withstood torture more than once but she'd just flushed and he knew - he knew - that she was hiding something, and it was something good.

He licked his lips and leaned forward, inadequacies of the soup forgotten. "Hermione," he said. "Does Potter know something?"

"I can't tell you," she said.

Draco picked up his spoon again and threw it as hard as he could at the wall. The physical rage didn't show in his voice at all when he said, "You'll fuck me, and keep me in one piece, and let me wipe blood off your injuries, but you don't trust me enough to - "

"I promised," she said. The words were so raw Draco stopped the tirade he'd been about to lose and kept himself under control. "I can't fight. I can't hold a wand without risking my hand trembling at the wrong moment. I can't do all the spells I used to be able to. All I have left is protecting Harry." She pushed her chair back and stood to go. Draco watched her stand up and move first toward the limited privacy of the toilet and then toward the door to the outside as if she weren't sure where to go. "I understand if that - "

"Give me some hope." Draco could hear the pleading in his voice. "I'll do anything, Hermione. Please."

She stopped and, without turning to face him, said, "Dumbledore left clues."

The words were so soft Draco could barely hear them and when he registered it was Dumbledore playing puppet master again he bit his tongue to keep from swearing. Blaise was watching her with the careful eyes of a man trying not to betray fear. Speak too loudly right now and she might bolt like a half-tamed falcon. "Potter has a plan?" Draco asked.

Hermione nodded, her head jerking.

"He's not just some desperate fool picking the weak off from the edge of the herd?"

She shook her head at that.

"There's hope?"

She didn't move.

"Please, Hermione."

"I can't tell you more," she said. "I can't. Please don't try to take this from me."

Draco took a deep breath. "If I defect," he began.

"Harry could tell you," she said. "If he trusted you."

"Well," Blaise said into that silence. "I guess that means you have to work on that Patronus charm, then."

. . . . . . . . . .

Draco became obsessed with the Patronus charm. He found books in the Hogwarts library devoted to the tricky magic and brought them home. When Hermione objected you weren't supposed to take books in that section out he just looked at her and she sighed. Of course no one told the Death Eater on site he couldn't have a book. They were probably glad he just wanted books on light magic and not to practice his unforgivables on students whose parents were out of favor with the regime. She hated the world, some days.

When attempt after attempt failed, he dug deeper into the theory. "You could do it before," he said. "You're using the same memory?"

"Yes," she said. She was becoming tired again and her hands were starting to shake. She could tell by the look on Blaise's face that he was about to intervene.

"What?" Draco demanded.

She tried not to cry. "The day my parents and I saw Diagon Alley for the first time," she said.

That broke through Draco's focus and he reached a hand out to brush against her arm. "I'm sorry," he said.

Blaise mouthed, 'dead?' at Draco who shook his head and mouthed, 'obliviated' back even as he pulled Hermione into his arms and sheltered her against his chest.

She could still remember how their eyes had sparkled because it was magic. The world was filled with more magic and wonder then they'd ever dreamt and their only daughter was part of it. They'd been excited and proud and wide-eyed all at once. She was magic. It had been the greatest day, a day of endless possibility. Now magic was scars that didn't fade and hands that shook when she was tired and a lover chained to a madman. She wanted this to be over so badly. She had to get this to work so she could summon Harry and he could tell Draco about the horcruxes, so he could give the man hope, so Draco could help. So it could be over and they could win. She cast the charm again from where she sat against that lover's heartbeat and this time didn't even manage a single puff of white smoke.

"Maybe that's not the best memory anymore," Draco said. "All things considered."

"I would think your happiest moment would be the first time you saw my - "

"Blaise," Draco hissed.

The other man looked as innocent as a man interrupted while making a crude comment could. "It's just a suggestion," he said. "Maybe something a little lighter in tone is the way to go."

"It was a great moment," Hermione said.

"A thing of beauty," Blaise said. He walked over and pulled the wand she still had in her fingers away. She didn't even resist as he disarmed her and ran a hand over her hair. "A thing of beauty," he said again.

"You have to stop pushing her so hard," he said to Draco after they'd gotten dinner into her and tucked her into bed before she fell into exhausted sleep. "She's spending all day, every day, trying to get that charm and then you come home and you just want to talk about theory and has she considered this and would she try that and maybe if she changed her pronunciation it would work."

"The woman I... She can't summon a happy memory," Draco said. "Not one. We broke her. Our world broke her. It's killing me."

"She can," Blaise said. "She has. And she'd not broken. She's fighting against a new wand and a her own physical weakness and a desperate lover who won't let it go."

"Am I that pathetic?" Draco asked in a whisper. Blaise tugged the man forward until he could lean his forehead against his. They sat there until Draco sighed and kissed Blaise, rough stubble rubbing against cheeks and lips on mouths until, when they broke apart, Draco said, "It's just so hard to have hope and then have her not - "

"She'll do it," Blaise said. "Has Hermione Granger ever not figured something out?"

"No," Draco admitted. A tiny, sad, amused laugh decorated the words. "Pushy know-it-all I swot."

"Exactly."

* * *

 **later**

"Can you imagine?" Ron asked. "The idea of Malfoy wrapped around Hermione's finger, willing to talk to us, willing to talk to _you_ about changing sides? Maybe she's been tortured until she's lost her mind and is just doing whatever she's told."

Harry shuddered. It wouldn't be the first time someone had been broken beyond repair. They both thought of Neville's parents and looked away from each other. Better to be dead than to have endured what they had and survive only to remain in enemy hands.

* * *

 **during**

"I can't do it." Hermione flung her wand down. "I've tried and tried and I can't. They broke me and I'm just... Muggle. I'm Muggle now."

Draco looked at Blaise, the plea for help clear in his eyes.

"You did the dishes with a spell this morning," Blaise said from where he sat on their couch. He had a Quidditch magazine in his hands - sport did go on despite war and tyrants - and was pretending to be interested in an article on the make up of this year's Bulgarian team. "I think you're status as a witch is pretty firmly established." He turned a page and eyed the shirtless spread of the Irish seeker. "Have you seen this, Draco?"

"He stuffs," Draco said.

Blaise squinted at the picture. "Are you sure?" he asked. The Irish seeker _did_ seem to be somewhat disproportionate but he'd been enjoying the fantasy.

"I looked at it at some length," Draco said. "I'm sure."

Hermione huffed but both Draco and Blaise were careful not to pay any attention to her. They'd decided she was freezing under the pressure to perform and if they just downplayed the entire matter she'd get it. Draco could almost manage to keep the panic out of his voice when he mentioned the Patronus Charm and was there maybe some other way to send a message to her wretched friends they'd believe? The almost killed it. She heard his growing hysteria that he'd almost had a hope of escape, a hope that he could even help end this terror, and her ineptitude was taking it away and she just became less and less able to do the charm. When she'd started she'd at least been able to produce a cloud of white smoke. Now, nothing.

"I'm just worthless," she said.

"Don't," Blaise said. The warning was clear in his voice and she exhaled in frustration.

"I feel very frustrated," she corrected herself.

"There isn't a timeline here," Blaise said. "Worse case scenario, Potter kills the bastard without Draco's help and we all scamper off to Italy to live our lives with a cat and lazy afternoons in the sun. "

"Worse case scenario," she started to say but Blaise interrupted her.

"Maybe two cats."

Hermione sank down into her chair with a bit of a flounce that Blaise tried not to smile at. The sulk meant she wasn't really upset anymore, not really. Frustrated, maybe, but he'd nipped her fears that she was worthless if she couldn't do this for Draco. The blond tossed her his wand. "Play with that for a bit," he said. "No one expects you to be able to do anything with someone else's wand."

She rolled her eyes but cast a series of sparkles that glittered in the air, a silly party charm she'd learned from the Weasley twins that brought happier days to mind. "How's work" she asked.

Draco began to tell a story about an old magical something he'd found locked in a cupboard in the room at Hogwarts he was currently working on clearing and cataloguing and how it played a little, tinny melody while a ballet dancer spun and he'd been about to dismiss it as a girl's jewellery box until a hobgoblin had spun into existence and begun to lecture him. He'd let the thing run him through an entire ballet class ("I apparently have excellent turn out but weak arms.") before he'd closed the thing up with a delighted sigh.

"Magic was wonderful," Hermione said a tad wistfully. She tried the Patronus charm again and then sputtered to a halt as first one, then a second, animal wriggled out of Draco's wand.

"What's that?" Blaise asked, almost afraid to breathe. "I thought you said it was an otter."

"It was," Hermione said.

"That's a ferret," Draco said. He sounded furious. "You made a ferret. That's not even funny, Hermione. Do you have any idea how much that - "

"I didn't do it on purpose," she said. The words were so soft Draco almost didn't hear them but the look on her face would have stopped him even if she hadn't said anything. She was looking at the ferret as it spun over and over in a joyful series of somersaults while what looked like some sort of falcon swooped over it. "It was always an otter before."

"Did using someone else's wand mess it up?" Blaise asked, though he was mostly transfixed with wonder. The two animal forms raced about the room, the falcon darting over and above the ferret wherever it went. "I thought you said it just was."

"I'm not an expert," Hermione said. "I mean, a ferret is kind of like an otter, right?"

"No," Draco said. "Not really." He moved as though he were going to fetch one of the innumerable books on the Patronus charm he'd brought home but he couldn't stop staring until the two animals darted out through the the wall and were gone. "What happened?" he said then. "Do it with yours." He picked up the her wand and held it out to her imperiously and she took it, her hand shaking.

The ferret and the falcon reappeared. If a ferret could look amused, this one did. "I knew you could do it," Blaise said. "There's nothing you can't do." He dropped the magazine, all pretense he cared about the stuffed Irish seeker forgotten, and picked her up and twirled her around. "Now all you have to do is send a message to Potter."

Hermione began to laugh. "Assuming he knows it's from me," she said. "Hey, Harry, not only am I not dead, my Patronus has changed."

* * *

 **before**

Draco handed the book on the Patronus charm to Blaise, his finger under the passage he wanted the other man to read. Blaise's eyes skimmed over the words and then he looked at the woman lying asleep on their bed, worn out by her success.

"We keep her safe," Draco said. "No matter what."

Blaise nodded. He couldn't speak around the lump in his throat.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - Thank you to Shayalonnie, who double checked the books for me to confirm that while Lupin tells Harry emotional upheaval can change a Patronus, there is no canonical moment where Hermione learns that information._**


	14. Chapter 14

**during**

Messages went back and forth, owls to drop boxes and patronuses and, after a delay that made Draco exclaim more than once that Potter was still the biggest arsehole to ever walk the earth, a meeting time was agreed upon. He'd sit at night on their couch, legs wrapped around Hermione, as she read and reread the precious notes that proved that Ron and Harry were still alive, her fingers tracing the scrawls of their abominable handwriting. Draco could feel his heart break a little at how much she missed them. He could feel a flutter of jealousy he tried to ignore at the sight of how much she hungered for proof they were fine. He couldn't picture her - couldn't picture anyone - holding on to a note from him with the same desperation.

Blaise caught that expression one of the long nights they spent setting up a meeting stripped of as much risk as possible and, when Hermione disappeared into the shower, touched Draco's shoulder. "She loves you, too," he said.

Draco shrugged and studied a scuff he'd gotten on the toe of one shoe. His father would have hated that, might have lectured him on how a man showed pride in himself by presenting a polished image to the world while running down how to do different shoe polishing charms. "It's fine," he said to Blaise. "They're her oldest friends. I understand."

Blaise cupped his face with one hand and said, simply, "Good, because green's a bad colour for you."

Draco laughed. "I think it's the only colour allowed these days. The colour of noble house of all things good and snaky."

"You know what I mean."

* * *

 **after**

Hermione traced her fingers over the loops of the signature. He was alive. She was going to kill him.

* * *

 **during**

Hermione stood in the garden outside the cottage, her arms wrapped around herself, and waited. The sun soaked into her hair and songbirds were loud and she'd come out early and then they were late and she began to think they weren't going to come. They'd gotten lost, or changed their minds, or worse. Her mind had raced to the worst possible outcomes of a Harry Potter who wasn't where he was supposed to be when the pair apparated into the woods outside the cottage, past the line of the Fidelius charm, and squinted at what to them looked like nothing but a continuation of trees and shadows.

"Is this the right spot," Ron asked and Hermione choked back a sob at hearing his voice even as she stepped past the safety line for the first time since Blaise and Draco had brought her home. He watched her appear and made a sound suspiciously like a sob of his own before he yanked her into an embrace that almost crushed her. "I thought you were dead," he said, the words muffled into her hair. "I thought they'd gotten you, and there was no way you could have survived."

"Hermione." It was all Harry said but she pulled herself from one set of arms to throw herself into another, and then all three of them were standing there, holding onto one another and pretending that the ways their eyes watered had to do with pollen and dust and anything but the relief of knowing they'd all survived. So far, they were all still mostly okay.

When Hermione they finally let one another go, Hermione took a deep breath and said, "You ready?"

"For Malfoy?" Harry let out a snort of derision. "Not really, but lead on."

She made a slightly pained expression, one side of her mouth pulling up in a grimace, then took each of their hands and led them into the garden. As they were admitted to the ring of the Fidelius Charm, Harry let out a long, low whistle. "Cute," he said.

Hermione looked at the small cottage with the windows she'd sat in and the tiny garden she'd dueled in and healed in. She'd spent so much time there she didn't really see it anymore. It was peculiar to see it through Harry's and Ron's eyes and, looking at it, she saw the myriad ways it spoke of wealth and indifference. For all the nettles in the flower beds, this wasn't the cottage of six impoverished brothers and their weaving sister. "It's home," was all she said, suddenly uncomfortable with the place's obvious aristocratic origins.

Draco and Blaise seemed to take the passing of the trio into their space as the sign to come out and the door opened and Draco stood there, Blaise behind him, and he and Harry regarded one another with crossed arms and scowls. "Potter," Draco said. "Nice of you to finally pay us a visit."

"Hermione said you had good biscuits," Harry said. "Couldn't pass up the image of Draco Malfoy with an apron on, stirring the batter."

"Hate to disappoint," Draco said. "We didn't cook for you."

"Shocker," said Ron.

Draco had lied, however, though it was true they hadn't baked. Knowing the pair of Order members had been on short rations, Blaise and Hermione had put together a meal that, while as uninspired as most of their cooking, did manage to combine calories in a way that soon had all five of them crowded around a table eating and avoiding conversation. "This is good," Ron said as he wiped his mouth, "so I'm assuming Hermione didn't have much to do with the preparation."

Draco smothered a laugh and Hermione glared at him. Harry looked from one to the other and then at Ron. Ron followed his gaze and just said, "Well, shite."

"What?" Blaise asked. He pushed back from the table and crossed his arms over his chest.

"This is for real," Ron said. He looked at Blaise. "All of you?" The question hung in the air and Hermione tensed.

"Didn't mean for it to happen," Blaise said. He picked the words out with care. "Neither of us did."

"But it still happened," Ron said. He seemed to balance between outrage and resignation. "You - "

"They saved my life," Hermione said. She hadn't gone into details in any of the missives she'd sent the boys but she did now and as she explained what had happened, with Blaise adding some details she didn't remember, Ron grew pale.

"You're okay now, though, right?" he asked.

When Hermione looked at Blaise with guilt in her eyes it was Harry who said, "Shite."

"She's not in a ward at St. Mungo's," Draco said. "We did the best we could."

"She can walk," Blaise said, "and think, and there aren't even any visible scars, but - "

"I have tremors," Hermione said, cutting off their defensive rambling. "I shake when I'm tired, and I get tired easily, and it's stopped improving, so I think this is probably it."

She watched Ron bite his lip and could see him exercising the self-control war had brought him. He nodded and said, "I'm sorry."

She reached across the table and took his hand and he squeezed her fingers. "It could have been a lot worse," she said.

"I don't know," Harry said, in a transparent attempt to add levity, "You fell for Malfoy. Does it really get worse than that?"

"She could have fallen for you?" Draco suggested.

The look Harry gave him was scathing. "Maybe we could move on to discussing your sudden interest in leaving the side of your noseless master and turning spy, because your personal life doesn't do it for me."

* * *

 **after**

Hermione stretched a leg out and opened one lazy eye. Blaise had gotten up sometime in the afternoon and returned to bed with some of the honeycomb they'd picked up at the market that morning. He smirked at her as he held the comb up and let it begin to dribble out onto her thigh.

"The sheets," she said, an obligatory protest to food in the bed, even as she realized someone, probably Draco since they dangled from his finger, had pulled her knickers off while she slept. She must have been exhausted.

"Lazy," Blaise said. "Sleeps all day, doesn't want to wash the sheets - "

"We all know she's not going to wash them," Draco said with a scoff. "Try again, Hermione."

But she was already laughing and spreading her legs and he grinned at her. "Is that a request?"

"Just don't want the honey to get on the sheets," she said. "Don't want to have to change them."

Draco and Blaise exchanged one of those looks she'd hated and now loved that spoke of their years of connection even as Draco tossed the knickers aside and lowered himself so his mouth was at her skin. Blaise took a bite out of the comb and watched them, lust and satisfaction dancing in his eyes, as Draco began to lick the sticky sweet off her skin. Each pass of his tongue woke her, each grazing of his teeth ignited her, until she had her hands in his hair and whimpered as he refused to move any higher up her skin. "The sheets," he said, his breath hot on her thighs. "Don't want them to get dirty."

"I hate you," she said as Blaise let some of the honey drip onto her stomach and Draco moved up - too far up, and began to lap at where it pooled in her naval.

She turned to eye Blaise and he shrugged. He would have been the picture of innocence if he hadn't been naked. She took one hand out of Draco's hair and reached over to run a nail along him. He inhaled sharply at that touch and she licked her lips.

"Don't tempt me," he said. "I'm trying to wait my turn."

She opened her mouth, planning to tell him not to be ridiculous, but Draco had finally stopped teasing her and she only let out a squeak that made them both laugh. She would have glared at Blaise, but he licked at the comb and then lowered his mouth to hers and shared the sweetness with her and she was distracted but all was well.

* * *

 **during**

Hermione sighed as she let her head loll against Blaise's shoulder. The pair of them, along with Ron, had retreated out to the garden to let Harry and Draco yell at one another. Things had started off smoothly enough, and the pair of boyhood rivals had shared notes on Voldemort, the war, what they both knew. Then Harry made a comment about the night the Death Eaters came to Hogwarts and ruffled Draco's feathers. Draco retaliated by commenting the Chosen One didn't really know much about being trapped. Harry had laughed so bitterly at that tears had come out his eyes.

"Fat lot you know about being trapped," he'd said. "Staying here in your pretty little cottage, able to make runs to the market, Hermione and Zabini keeping the bed warm for you."

"You don't know shite, Potter," almost exploded out of Draco's mouth.

It got worse from there and, after a few minute, Hermione discretely yanked both their wands and tipped her head toward the yard. Ron and Blaise followed her out, all planning to out wait what surely couldn't take that long. At first they'd just talked over the loud yelling coming from inside, then they'd muffled the cottage, and now, whenever anyone looked in, Draco and Harry appeared to be in a pantomime of silent, heated gesturing. It was almost funny.

"They have a few things to work out," Blaise said. He'd gone inside, fetched food, and come back and the three people outdoors had had a picnic while the yelling had gone on and on and on.

"Malfoy's a git," Ron muttered. He glanced at Hermione. "No offense."

"So're you," Blaise said. His hand seemed to want to reach for his wand.

"And I'm no peach myself," Hermione said. "Can we stay focused on defeating you-know-who and not on how much we didn't care for one another at sixteen?"

"At sixteen he let Death Eaters into Hogwarts," Ron said.

"And by eighteen, his parents were dead," Hermione said. "It's a war, Ron. They held a knife to his throat. What would you have done if Molly had been in you-know-who's custody?"

Ron bristled and looked ready to say he'd have fought the good fight, but at her level look he subsided. "Probably what he did," he admitted. "Doesn't mean I have to like it. Doesn't mean I have to curl up in his lap and trust the blighter now."

"Draco's lap is taken," Blaise said.

"I see that," Ron said, and then they all fell into another silence, too strained to make polite small talk. He watched as Hermione shifted the way she leaned on Blaise and the way the man tucked her into him so she'd be comfortable. When she'd drifted off, Ron said, "Your arm'll fall asleep if you let her stay like that."

"I know," Blaise said.

* * *

 **after**

The screeching was followed by a loud hiss and the sound of two cats racing down the stairs. Draco picked up a pillow and pulled it with an emphatic thump over his head. The muffled demand, "Whose idea were these cats?" emerged from beneath the feathers and ticking.

"Yours," Blaise and Hermione said in unison.

Draco groaned at the sound of something, probably something expensive and fragile, getting knocked to the ground. "I was an idiot," he said.

Hermione glanced at Blaise, who was trying not to laugh. "Do you think we can get a recording of that?" he asked. "Just to haul out and play back whenever we need to?"

Draco threw the pillow at Blaise and missed.

* * *

 **during**

"Horcruxes?" Draco had yelled himself out and now he just sagged at the table and drank the tea Blaise had made. That it was more than laced with whiskey had helped bring the man from fury and outrage and despair to borderline hysterical. He'd begun to laugh when he'd told Blaise, then he'd cried. Immortal. The man was immortal. He really was the monster under the bed, unkillable. It really was unending.

"We just have to get them all," Hermione said. "We know what they are, we think. They're just almost impossible to find, and…"

"And some of them are in my home." Draco began to laugh again. "The place I learned to fly a broom and where I made biscuits with my mother has the Darkest relics imaginable just tucked away. Here's your grandmother's tea set. Here's the plate you made at art class at four with your handprint on it. Oh, and here's a foul bit of magic keeping the devil alive. Not a problem, right?"

The laughter turned to tears. "All you have to do it find them and destroy them with almost uncontrollable magic. That's all."

"There's only three left," Hermione said. "And one of them in Harry."

"And one of them is his _snake_ ," Draco said. "I watched that snake _eat a person_."

"Well," Blaise said. "It sounds like you need to find the cup first, and get it to the noble and glorious house of idiots, and then they'll take care of it, and then the snake."

"And then all of hell breaks loose and the devil burns us all." Draco buried his face in his hands. "I can probably find the cup. I can even get it past the wards and off to our Hermione's friends. But how do we kill the snake without starting a war?"

"We're already in a war," Hermione said. She set her hand on his. "Draco, if you think you can't - "

"I can," he said. "I will." He laced his fingers through hers. "Anything to be free," he said. "Anything but losing you." His eyes caught Blaise's. "Right?"


	15. Chapter 15

**during**

He wiped the blood from his face as the goblet in front of him hissed and smoked. It reminded him of nothing so much as a campfire that hisses and spit forth smoke when you dumped water on it. The difference, of course, was that smoke from a fire you'd sat around with friends and a bottle of whiskey and some laughter rose up in white tendrils and this thing put the filthiest Muggle smokestack to shame. The black vapor shifted and there was Hermione, her arms wrapped around Blaise. "She'll never forgive you," the smoke whispered. "And he's found love that doesn't come with a curse burned into it with her. You're the extra now, the one neither really wants." Hermione kissed Blaise in the vision, her eyes filled with the kind of rapt joy that had nothing to do with lust or pleasure. This Hermione loved Blaise, and looked out at him with pity and contempt. "Nothing you do could ever redeem your past," she said. "Whatever made you think I'd ever trust you after all the years you despised me?" Blaise looped an arm around her and smiled one of the cold smiles that never reached his eyes. "I don't need you anymore. I can take her away, love her, and never think about you or your failures again."

Draco looked at Potter. "You plan to stab that thing with your fancy tooth again anytime soon?" he asked, his voice as steely as years of not revealing things to a crazed legilimens could make it. "I don't think once quite did the trick."

Potter plunged his basilisk fang into the cup again and this time the poison ate away at the fragment of broken soul and both men stood over a hunk of twisted metal.

"Pity," Draco said. "It had some nice work, that cup."

Harry set a hand on his shoulder, not quite a clasp of solidarity but not a repudiation either. "She loves you," he said. "I don't know why, but she'd have died before she gave me up, you know."

Draco closed his eyes against that memory. "I know," he said.

"So, she let you know I was alive and… she loves you, Malfoy. Trusts you."

"I hope she still does when it's all over," he said.

Harry's fingers tightened and Draco thought how funny it was that he'd almost become friends with the Chosen One after all these years. "She will," Harry said. "She'll be pissed as hell at you, but she'll understand."

"I hope so," Draco said.

* * *

 **later**

Hermione laughed so hard as she curled her tongue around Draco she almost choked. Blaise snickered at the sound but gave Draco a shove anyway. "You really shouldn't say things like that," he said. "If you bruise her throat because you make her laugh, and I don't get a turn, I'll have something to say to you."

"Whinger," Draco said. "It's hardly my fault I'm sufficiently large that the woman might be too exhausted after me to indulge you in whatever it is you're waiting for."

"Doesn't seem fair," Blaise said as he reached a hand down between Hermione's legs and teased a squeak out of her. She shifted to give him better access, and shoved at Draco so he moved to make the angle easier for her. "Why should I suffer?"

Draco let out a theatrical, much put-upon sigh and said, as if conceding a tremendously contentious point, "Fine. If I exhaust her, _I'll_ blow you. Happy now?"

Blaise sighed in return. "It's just that she's better."

That seemed to really outrage Draco, and he pushed himself up on his elbows and glared at Blaise. "She is not," he said, "and I'll prove it."

Hermione pulled her head back and looked at Draco. "Rude," she said.

* * *

 **during**

Draco looked far too pleased with himself when he came through the door of the cottage, and the smug smile seemed at terrible odds with the bloody slice decorating one cheekbone. Hermione set down the book she'd been reading and half rose out of her chair at the sight of the line of red.

"Fall against something?" Blaise asked, even as Hermione saw his hands twitch to wash it, put a plaster over it, fix it.

"Met one of your crazy Aurors," Draco said, directing the words to Hermione. "Is everyone on the side of the angels bloody mad?"

"One of… but you're on our side," Hermione said.

"Mmm," Draco said. "Well, you know, once a Malfoy, always a Malfoy. Don't trust us, we'll sell you out at the first possible opportunity." He tossed his wand into the air and caught it and smirked at them both. "What's for dinner, anyway?"

"Old cheese," Hermione said. Since he obviously wasn't going to die from the cut on his face, however ugly it looked, she move on to finding out what had happened. "What have you done?"

"Which Auror hit you," Blaise asked. "We can have Hermione send a Patronus to Potter to tell him – "

"Oh, he knows," Draco said. Before Hermione could explode in the outrage that an Auror had attacked him after he'd gone over to their side, and that Harry had been right there, Draco added, "Potter stopped him. Read him the riot act, too. Merlin, what a glorious day. Never thought I'd get to hear Saint Potter tell one of the good guys off on my behalf."

He flung himself down onto the couch. "Anyone up for sex to celebrate? I'm not fussy as to who but I'm in the mood."

Blaise glanced at Hermione. "Do you think he's been confunded?" he asked her.

"I think he'd better tell us what's going on before he wishes he were confunded," she said.

"Oh, c'mon," Draco said. "Just a little cock sucking? I'm all hurt." He put on the saddest puppy dog eyes imaginable, though the way his mouth continued to twitch up as though he knew the best secret ever rather ruined the effect. He patted the bloody mark on his face. "It really stung, too. Honestly thought I'd made the worst mistake ever for a moment. Bastard's lucky I figured killing him likely wouldn't go over well because I have to admit I was tempted." He took his hand down and examined the blood on it. "Might have been because of the damn horcrux, though. Potter told me they tend to bring out your worst traits."

Hermione put her hands over her mouth and looked at Draco. "You found it?" she asked. The question was too obvious to need to be answered, but if it hadn't, the flash of vindictive joy on Draco's face would have been enough.

"One more down," he said. "All that's left are the snake and – "

"Yes," Hermione said before he could go on. She pushed the final horcrux to the back of her mind and flung herself at Draco. He laughed and made a series of token protests as she kissed his face over and over again, but the way he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer to him belied his words that she needed to be careful, he was an injured man, he'd been attacked by an Auror just that afternoon.

He buried his face in her hair and breathed in the scent as she hugged him. He and Blaise made eye contact over her head and Blaise seemed to shake before he braced himself and said, "Well, good work. That didn't take as long as I'd feared."

"Idiot had it in my aunt Bella's vault," Draco said. "To which I have a key. I told her I wanted to go root around for an old Black heirloom I'd read about in a book at Hogwarts and she couldn't pat me on the head fast enough, all excited I might have found a new Dark artifact she could play with."

"Crazy bitch," Blaise said.

"Indeed," Draco said. He tugged Hermione until she was nestled up against his side. "Bad news is, I did have to pass the witch a nasty amulet that belonged to one of the old Black harpies, but I gave Potter a run down on it and how to counteract it so, with any luck, it won't matter."

"What's it do?" Blaise asked.

"Crushes your heart," Draco said. "But the incantation to get it to go is pretty long, so as long as you silence the witch wearing it, you're safe."

"Those old Black biddies were heartbreakers," Blaise said.

Draco's look made Blaise laugh and Hermione joined in with delight. Heartbreakers, indeed. Their grandson, or great-grandson might be, but she had trouble imagining Walburga toying with men's hearts, a coquette in a pointed hat. "So you got it," Hermione said.

"One cup," Draco said. "Picked up and delivered to Potter, despite the Auror's attempt to off me. I watched them stab the bloody thing." A quick shudder went through him. "That bastard's soul is about a vile as you might expect. Not sure how you all managed it with the first four if that cup was any indication of the way they fight back."

"It's gone," Hermione said, as if she needed to hear it one more time.

"Gone," Draco confirmed. "Spewed my worst fears at me then gurgled and folded in on itself. It's done for." He folded the arm he didn't have wrapped around her behind his head and spread his legs. "So," he said to the room at large, "about that blow job? I think I've earned it."

* * *

 **later**

Ron leaned back against the wall at the safe house. "Harry," he said. "What's a seven letter bird that symbolizes sacrifice?"

Harry opened his eyes. "Are you doing a crossword again?"

Ron grunted.

"Why?"

"I like puzzles," Ron said. "I have to pass the time between fights somehow, and you won't play chess with me anymore."

"Because you always win," Harry said. He closed his eyes again and Ron sighed and scratched in an answer to another clue.

"Bird begins with P," Ron said. "If that helps."

Harry muttered under his breath and when Ron said, "What?" he repeated himself.

"It's a pelican," he said as though the answer were obvious.

"How the hell do you know that?" Ron asked even as he wrote the letters with a very light hand in case he needed to scratch them out later.

"Something about being the sacrificial offering makes me remember weird little facts," Harry said.

Ron grunted again because that made sense.

Harry sighed and sat up. "Suppose we should get going," he said.

Ron set his paper down, puzzle unfinished, and checked his pocket to make sure his wand was there. "I'd love to get in one good hex," he said. "Nothing fatal, mind you, just something. It would make me feel good, bring a little pleasure to my dull life."

"If you're resorting to Muggle crosswords, it's beyond dull," Harry said. "No one warns you war is mostly boredom."

"No one warned us about a lot of things," Ron said. He picked up one of the flasks at his side and tossed it over to Harry. "How foul this shite tastes can go on the list of 'things no one talked about.'"

Harry caught the flask, uncorked it, and took a long swallow. "You've known this stuff was nasty since second year," he said. "Get your things and let's move."

* * *

 **during**

Draco lay sprawled on the bed, head back. "I am the luckiest man alive," he said. "Life is so, so beautiful."

Hermione and Blaise exchanged looks. "One little blow job and he thinks the world is filled with rose gardens," Blaise said but he sounded amused.

"Not one," Draco said. "That was more than one."

"Two, then," Hermione said.

Draco propped himself up on one elbow, smirked at her, and then, as if that were too much effort, flopped back down again. "Beautiful, beautiful life," he said again. "It's perfect, this beautiful life. I want this for always. You two, and me, and sex, and the sun coming in at just that angle. And cake. I want cake."

"And a cat?" Hermione asked.

"In our villa in Italy," Draco agreed. "The three of us, together."

"That would be nice," Hermione said.

"Promise me," Draco said.

"Promise you what?" she asked.

He lifted his head and looked at her. "Promise me that when this war is over, you'll be there in that villa. You, me, Blaise."

"And the cat," Hermione said.

Draco didn't let go of her eyes until she said, "Draco, we might not – "

"We will," Draco said. The words were fierce and, for the first time since she'd laughed and pulled his trousers down and agreed that, yes, a man who destroyed a horcrux did indeed deserve all the sex he could handle, Hermione's smile faltered and faded away.

"You can't know that," she said. She didn't want war to intrude. They'd just had a respite for a short moment that had been about bodies and relief and happiness and now he was bringing war back into their bed. Or she was, and he was delusional. Either way, she didn't like it.

"Just be there," Draco said. "No matter what. _Promise me_."

Hermione looked over at Blaise. He looked just as intent as he watched her. She didn't understand how this agreement to be together after the war suddenly meant so much to both of them, but she decided to put it down to the stress of a day facing a thing that spewed out your worst fears for Draco, and Blaise just being supportive.

"I'll be there," she said.

"No matter what I have to do," Draco said.

She laced her fingers through his. "Draco," she said, "I know you've had to… this is a war. I know you've done things you'd rather not have had to. I know that. And it's not over. There could be more. I get it."

"No matter what I have to do," he said, and his fingers tightened on hers until she had to control a flinch. "No matter what, you'll be there."

"No matter what," she said. "I'll be there."

He relaxed back. "Good," he said. "That's good."


	16. Chapter 16

**during**

They didn't come at night, in the shadows, hiding in the darkness. They came when the sun was out, the coffee was still steaming, and Hermione had been making a joke about how loud the birds were in the morning and how is a woman supposed to sleep with all of that racket. She had laughed, and Blaise had laughed, and Draco had laughed, until he raised his eyes to the window of their cottage and all the color drained from a face that never had much to begin with. A man as white as fear stared out at the black robed figures who had stepped over the line that marked the edge of the Fidelius charm and were advancing toward the door. Hermione saw the look on his face and spun in her seat to look out as well and she began to shake. She shook and her jaw trembled and a tiny spasm ran through her hands.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," one of the robed figures said, and then she pulled the silver mask off her face, and Alecto Carrow cackled as she regarded the beautiful cottage in front of her. "I heard you had a little Mudblood that you play games with, Draco," she called out. "Naughty naughty, little boy. We like our friends to share their toys don't we, Amycus?"

"How did they get here?" Blaise hissed, his eyes on the two Death Eaters who had stopped advancing and were twirling there wands between their hands with anticipation of presumed delights to come. "Draco, how are they here? Is this…?" He trailed off and left his question hanging in the air.

"I don't know," Draco said, his eyes never leaving the window. "We took every precaution. I thought we were safe."

They both looked at Hermione, who had fumbled for her wand and held it in a white-knuckled grasp.

Draco said, "It doesn't matter, now. Just get her out of here."

"You don't get to just send me away," Hermione said. She pushed her chair back and stood up too quickly, knocking the chair over. It fell backward and hit the floor with a loud crash that made all three of them flinch. "This is my fight too."

"Don't be stupid," Draco said. "Your hands shake when you hold a cup of coffee."

"Draco," Alecto called from the yard. "We're getting bo-ored." She dragged the words out into a singsong that made even Blaise go absolutely gray but also jerked him into action. He turned sharply, every moment crisp and short, and opened up a cupboard to pull down the unremarkable box with the ugly little bird figurine inside of it.

He and Draco made eye contact, and Draco said, the words low and urgent, "Keep her safe, Blaise. I'm counting on you."

"I will," Blaise said.

"No," Hermione said. And then she said it again, more loudly. "No!"

One of the Death Eaters leveled a curse toward the door and, with a boom, it shattered and the wood flew out, splinters trying to pierce them like arrows. If Draco hadn't thrown up an instant _protego_ that protected them, it would have been as if they'd been shot full of arrows.

Blaise hissed furiously toward the now shattered door, wrapped his arms around Hermione and prepared to activate the portkey that would pull them both to his villa in Italy even as she began to fight him. We can't just leave him here to fight those two alone." Her voice became a pleading thing. "Blaise, he'll die."

Blaise shook his head and tightened his grip and she said in a rising panic, "Blaise, let me go."

"I'm trying to buy you time to get away, you stupid witch," Draco said. He turned from the advancing duo, his eyes running up and down the furious woman as if trying to memorize her.

"We need to go, Hermione," Blaise said. He was angry, urgent, and his jaw so tight he'd be rubbing it with pain potions for days. "Don't you dare make his sacrifice meaningless by refusing to leave. Don't. You. Dare."

She reached toward Draco, who had begun to walk toward the opening in the wall. Her voice became a whisper as she begged him to stay but he just took step after inexorable step toward the door. Draco's steps faltered for moment when she said, her voice hoarse, "I'm begging you. I won't make it without you," but he didn't look back before going out to face the Death Eaters on his lawn.

She stretched her arms toward him again, but Blaise had already activated the portkey and he and Hermione were pulled away with a sickening, whooshing lurch, he arms still out and her screams of "Draco" hanging in the air.

. . . . . . . . . .

They landed hard onto the floor in the entry way of the villa. Blaise let her go and stepped back, his hand on his wand in case she attacked him. She spun and looked around as if, despite the obvious feel of travel by portkey, she might still be in the small cottage in the English country-side, might still be able to save Draco. She lowered her arm after a moment. The cool stones of the entry way met pale blond rock walls that rose up to a high ceiling. Blaise cracked open one of the heavy wooden doors so a beam of bright sun filled the room as she sank down onto a wooden bench and began to sob in defeat. The figures in the painting over her head stirred uncomfortably and Blaise didn't make eye contact with any of the family matriarchs looking out at him as he knelt at Hermione's feet. "He made me promise," Blaise said. "He made me promise I would get you away if anything ever happened."

"That… that _arsehole_ ," Hermione choked out and he took her hands in his and held on. She snapped her head up at the touch. "You have a portkey back," she said. "You have to. You're too careful, too prepared to not." She pushed past him as if she were going to ransack the entire villa in order to find whatever innocuous object would take her back to Draco's side, back to help him fight, back to save him. When her leg shook so badly she almost fell with a sudden spasm that made her grip the wall, she closed her eyes and let out a great, gasping sound that made Blaise want to pull her back to England, to hand her back to Draco, to somehow make everything okay.

It was just that nothing was okay, and nothing could be okay, until her side had won.

"Do you want to sleep?" Blaise asked her, knowing the suggestion was idiotic even as he made it. "Maybe things won't feel so horrible when you - "

"He was going up against - "

"And he's _good_ ," Blaise interrupted her. "You know he's good at fighting. The Carrow twins can't… Amycus and Alecto, all of them, they think he's nothing but an effete, pathetic boy and you know and I know that _they're wrong_."

Hermione's eyes got the tiniest bit of hope in them, but that hope was extinguished when she followed her thoughts. Even if Draco could defeat two sadistic, borderline unstable Death Eaters, if they had come, if he killed them, it meant Voldemort knew. He knew Draco has sheltered her. It would probably be better to die quickly at their hands than be dragged back to the manor that had been his own home only to die more slowly. "Blaise," she said, the words keening. "If Voldemort knows, he'll die. Draco will _die_."

"I know," Blaise said. He pulled her into as tight of an embrace as he dared, fearing at first she'd attack him, then gripping her with desperation when she sagged into his arms and her tears began to wet his shoulder. "I know," he said more softly. It had always been crucial that no one know about her. She'd been a death sentence from the night he'd insisted they save her.

"He never got out," Hermione said, lost in the misery of what had to be happening back in Britain. "He wanted to be free and he didn't… he never got out, never got away." She cried harder at that and Blaise scooped her up and began carrying her through the hall and up the wide stairs to the only bedroom in the villa. It was a small place, unobtrusive and old and beautiful in the way that only vast amounts of money could make a place. He had dreamed of bringing Draco here and living their lives out as exiles. He'd planned to hire a woman from the nearby village to cook and spend his time not being afraid. Not being sad. Not worrying with every day that this would be the day Draco would finally get too hurt to be patched back together, that he'd stumble though the door with an injury no potion could heal. Instead of having coffee with Draco on the terrace, he carried a sobbing woman up the steps and lay her down on the wide bed, easily large enough for all three of them and that cat Draco had talked about wanting to get. She curled onto her side on the white blanket as the light from the window filtered into the room giving it the illusion of peace and cried and cried and cried as lay down next to her and wrapped his body around her and, at last, let his own tears slide down his face.

This wasn't the way he'd wanted to come to this place.

He'd promised, and he'd agreed it was the right choice, and he'd done what Draco asked. He didn't even regret it. Not really.

He just wished it didn't make him feel so miserable.

. . . . . . . . . .

Draco stopped then, his shoulders collapsed and he had to brace himself against the frame of the door as the two Carrows looked at him, then into the house where Blaise and Hermione had vanished. He waited because he thought this was only a little bad, but it case it was truly horrible he wanted to be able to attack the bastards and apparate away.

Amycus Carrow let out a sigh, lowered his wand and tugged the mask off his face. "Fuck," he said. "These things are so bloody uncomfortable. How do you people wear them?"

Draco reached his hand up to rub at his forehead and gave the pair a wry, relieved grimace. "Knowing that if you don't wear them, your lord and master is likely to crucio you is fairly strong motivation."

Amycus shuddered at that. "You know," he said, "I'd really hoped to be able to get one good curse in. Nothing that would really cripple you, mind, but all these years of hating you, and I finally get a chance to land something on you and the timing just doesn't work out. I'm disappointed."

Alecto gave Amycus a nasty look but Draco laughed. "Sorry about that," he said. "Maybe next time."

"A man can dream," Amycus agreed.

Draco held the door open and ushered the pair inside. The polyjuice

potion had already started to wear off and Amycus' hair had started to spout tufts of the infamous Weasley red. "Can I interest you in some coffee," Draco asked. "It's still warm."

Alecto, half-transformed back into Harry, set a hand on Draco's shoulder. "You okay?" he asked.

Draco looked at him with tired, defeated eyes. "Would you be okay?" he asked in return.

Harry exchanged glanced with Ron and said, "You're a damn good man, Draco Malfoy."

Draco shrugged, his eyes on the empty box that had held the portkey moments before.

"She'll forgive you," Ron said into the silence. "Woman forgave you for a lot more than doing a little play to get her off to safety." He sounded as if he might be trying to convince himself as much as reassure the suddenly tired man sitting at his own table his motionless hand on his coffee cup. It seemed even the energy required to take a sip had left him.

"Besides," Harry said, taking his hand rather awkwardly off Draco's shoulder and shoving it down into a pocket. "It's only for a month or two anyway. With them gone, you can wiggle into close to the bastard, most of the pieces are in place. We'll kill the snake, and then old snake face and I will have our special moment together."

"Well," Draco said, "you two are sort of made for one another.

"Lucky me," Harry said. "My soulmate is a sociopathic madman."

"Just kill him," Draco said, "So we can all live happily ever after."

"Except for me," Harry said.

If Draco were the sort to squirm when he was uncomfortable or felt guilty, he'd have squirmed at that. He wasn't, so all he did was shrug. "You don't know that," he said. "You overcame certain death once already fighting that bastard. Twice, even. Hell, you might have even died. Hard to be sure. Maybe you'll do it again."

Harry shook his head and picked up what had been Blaise's cup. "This is good," he said after he took a sip. "Draco Malfoy, coffee-maker extraordinaire. Things I never would've expected."

"It's not me," Draco said. "I can barely brew tea using a bag. Blaise is the one who makes good coffee."

Ron laughed. "Then I guess you're fucked for the next few weeks," he said. No more gourmet coffee for you."

"We all make sacrifices," Draco said, his fingers still toying with the handle on the cup he didn't pick up.


	17. Chapter 17

**during**

"Go home," Harry said.

Draco staggered until he reached a wall he could brace himself against. "I think they might have burned it down," he said. He reached up to wipe his face and grimaced at the feel of snake sliming across his skin. He'd never be clean again. "Once they realized I was on your side, I'm pretty sure someone found a way to break that charm and raze the place. It's the kind of pointless destruction they'd like."

Potter grunted, the closest he'd probably come to admitting Draco was right.

"How's the arm?"

Draco looked over at Ron. He thought about making a quip about how it was good to know he cared, but he knew it was more about how dark the Merlin-be-damned thing on his arm was. A push of his sleeve, and a wipe of his hand, and he closed his eyes with relief. It was already fading. Ron saw the sagging shoulders, and caught his breath, but had to look at the Mark for himself. The dull grey lines had been black that morning. Ron rubbed at them and Draco resisted the urge to yank himself away. He didn't need to be pawed at. The man had his confirmation.

"You need to kill me?" Harry asked, as if they body language hadn't already given that away.

"Alas, no," Draco said. "Seems somewhere in one of your endless, miraculous not-quite-deaths someone already took care of your headache problem."

"We did it," Ron said. Then he cackled with an almost hysterical glee, yelled the words so the whole world could hear, then collapsed into a pile of sobbing, overwrought survival. "We did it," he whispered one last time.

"Weasley?" Draco asked. Now he had to feel worry for the man's stability? He wouldn't have thought a day that started off with breaking into his own home, slaughtering people he'd drunk with at parties, and being hailed as a traitor, all so he could get to the snake and end the last horcrux, could have gotten worse. Comforting Ron Weasley would make it worse. There were limits.

"He's fine," Harry said.

"And here I thought the good guys didn't lie," Draco said. None of them were fine. They were all covered in blood, soot, and ash. They'd all gone into the day expecting to die. That the three of them had made it to half-hearted attempts to resume old hostilities was more than he'd hoped for. He looked over at Voldemort's body. It seemed smaller in death. He was just a slumped man, not very old for a wizard, deformed by Dark magic. He seemed more pitiable than terrifying. The battle hadn't even been dramatic. Once the horcruxes were gone, he'd died as easily as any other man. He'd started to posture and declaim and Harry Potter had just struck him with one Unforgivable. One burst of green light and all his years of slavery had been over, the war had been over, everything had been over. "You disappoint me, Potter," he said.

"Maybe this will make up for it." Harry Potter tossed over an old, broken watch.

Draco snatched it from the air and held it up, turning it in the dull light to inspect it. The clasp had fallen off, the hands had stopped moving, and the fake gold had mostly worn away. "You give amazing presents," he said. "That Ginny is a lucky girl.

"Blow me, Malfoy," Ron muttered from where he sat on the floor.

Draco made a show of stepping away. "Your poverty might be contagious," he said. "I'll pass."

"It's a portkey," Potter said.

Draco froze and turned to look at the hero of the hour, the man who'd managed to live yet again, his savior. He wasn't sure how he'd feel about that in the morning. He suspected he'd choke on it. It didn't make it untrue. When all the dust settled and the blood was wiped away, he'd have to go on being grateful to Harry Potter for his whole life. "It's a what?" he asked.

Ron laughed, though the sound rasped through a throat that had had some hard usage that day screaming directions to their team. "You think we'd let Hermione spend one moment longer than she had to worrying about your pathetic arse?" he asked.

"It goes to Italy?" Draco asked. His fingers tightened around the broken bit of cheap jewelry.

"Goes right to your front door," Harry said. His smile was a little too understanding and Draco had to look away. "Zabini sent me the information I needed to get it made. You aren't the only one who's been writing the prat. Go home."

"You might want to get cleaned up first," Ron said. He made a show of sniffing the air, as if he could make out one person's smell in the foul, post-battle air. "You stink."

"Fuck you, Weasley," Draco said. He nodded at Potter, who might have made some noises about how he'd better be invited to the wedding, but Draco couldn't be sure because he'd already activated the Portkey and was gone.

* * *

 **after**

Blaise caught his breath when the door opened. He'd known the final battle was imminent, but there had been no way of knowing how it would go. He had tried to prepare himself for the worst because hope was what killed you.

He closed his eyes and opened them again. The light streaming through the door turned Draco into a shadow with an areola of white hair that glowed but the hair let him know who it was. When the figure stepped forward he could see the blood and the dirt. "He's gone," Draco said. Blaise turned away for a moment. Some things were too raw to let anyone, even a beloved partner, see. They'd made it. Somehow, they'd made it.

Then he looked around for Hermione. She had to have heard the door open. For all they called the place a villa it was small, and every sound echoed, and no one ever came to it. She should have come running.

"She's too… is she too angry to even look at me?" Draco asked. The words seemed to be torn out of him. He'd fantasized about this moment. He'd played long scenarios in his head where she covered her mouth with her hands and gasped and then ran to fling herself at him, heedless of his filth, heedless of her own weakness. He'd imagined her throwing her arms around him and sobbing and telling him she'd never forgive him and how had he survived even as she covered his face in kisses.

He'd gotten through a lot thinking of their reunion. Blaise had told him in letters how she'd cried herself to sleep at first, then seemed to recover, though always with an angry, wounded edge to her. "Hermione?" he asked uncertainly, almost afraid to speak loudly. If he yelled, and she didn't come running, he would know she hated him again.

Not, he supposed that he didn't deserve it.

"Hermione?" he asked again, trying to be heard this time.

A familiar head of bushy hair appeared above crossed arms at one of the room's doors. "Draco," she said. She sounded like nothing so much as someone mildly irritated her husband was late. "I hope you plan to wash up before dinner."

Draco felt all his fantasies die as she sized him up and then, when a smile tugged at her mouth, come to live again and he knew he was home. "I will," he said. "I promise."

 ** _finis_**


End file.
